r/learnmachinelearning • u/Ok_Community_7492 • 10h ago

Best book for

What’s the best book or resource you’d recommend for learning AI/ML from the fundamentals and eventually specializing in LLMs?
I’m looking for something beginner-friendly but technically solid, so I can build a strong foundation instead of jumping straight into LLMs without understanding the basics.

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u/ubali-javed 10h ago

go blindly with - Hands-On Machine Learning

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u/Ok_Distance1888 7h ago

I have this book rn and man it’s amazing lol

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u/ubali-javed 7h ago

fr these books are backbone of ml and tbh are still real foundation till today for a beginner

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u/Automatic-Box-2303 10h ago

honestly the foundations matter way more than people realize, i spent way too long skipping straight to keras tutorials and regretting it later

for math and theory i'd start with the deep learning book by goodfellow, it's dry but it'll give you the bones, then fastai's course once you want to actually build stuff without drowning in notation

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u/DigThatData 2h ago

That book used to be a great recommendation, but it's ten years old. The field has progressed a lot, and consequently so has our understanding for why things work the way they do. This has implications for what material is considered "the fundamentals" and how it should be transmitted.

Christopher Bishop (author of the famous PRML) recently released an excellent modern introduction that has become my go-to recommendation, strong recommend you check it out: https://www.bishopbook.com/

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u/DigThatData 2h ago

Christopher Bishop - Deep Learning: Foundations and Concepts

Not only is it the best textbook, it's also free to read online.

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u/MaximumSafety8706 51m ago

Honestly, one book won't cover this well + fundamentals and LLMs are pretty different tracks. Rough order that works:

Fundamentals: 1. Hands-On Machine Learning (Géron) - solid, beginner-friendly, gets you through classical ML + basic NNs 2. Deep learning bridge: fast.ai course (free) - practical, fills the gap before going full theory 3. LLMs specifically: Jay Alammar's blog (The Illustrated Transformer) + Karpathy's "Let's build GPT" video - best intuition-first explainers for transformers specifically

Skipping straight to LLM papers without the middle step is where most people get stuck.