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About the Book

UPDATE (August, 25th, 2024) - Revised for PyTorch 2.x!

The latest revised edition (v1.2) was published today to address changes in PyTorch, Torchvision, and other libraries. The chapters most affected were Chapter 4 (in Part II, Computer Vision) and Chapter 11 (in Part IV, NLP).

UPDATE (July, 19th, 2022): The Spanish version of Part I, Fundamentals, was published today: https://leanpub.com/pytorch_ES

UPDATE (February 23rd, 2022): The paperback edition is available now (the book had to be split into 3

volumes for printing). For more details, please check pytorchstepbystep.com.

UPDATE (February 13th, 2022): The latest revised edition (v1.1.1) was published today to address small changes to Chapters 9 and 10 that weren't included in the previous revision.

UPDATE (January 23rd, 2022): The revised edition (v1.1) was published today - better graphics, improved formatting, larger page size (thus reducing page count from 1187 to 1045 pages - no content was removed!). If you already bought the book, you can download the new version at any time!

If you're looking for a book where you can learn about Deep Learning and PyTorch without having to spend hours deciphering cryptic text and code, and that's easy and enjoyable to read, this is it :-)

The book covers from the basics of gradient descent all the way up to fine-tuning large NLP models (BERT and GPT-2) using HuggingFace. It is divided into four parts:

• Part I: Fundamentals (gradient descent, training linear and logistic regressions in PyTorch)
• Part II: Computer Vision (deeper models and activation functions, convolutions, transfer learning, initialization schemes)
• Part III: Sequences (RNN, GRU, LSTM, seq2seq models, attention, self-attention, transformers)
• Part IV: Natural Language Processing (tokenization, embeddings, contextual word embeddings, ELMo, BERT, GPT-2)

This is not a typical book: most tutorials start with some nice and pretty image classification problem to illustrate how to use PyTorch. It may seem cool, but I believe it distracts you from the main goal: how PyTorch works? In this book, I present a structured, incremental, and from first principles approach to learn PyTorch (and get to the pretty image classification problem in due time).

Moreover, this is not a formal book in any way: I am writing this book as if I were having a conversation with you, the reader. I will ask you questions (and give you answers shortly afterward) and I will also make (silly) jokes.

My job here is to make you understand the topic, so I will avoid fancy mathematical notation as much as possible and spell it out in plain English.

In this book, I will guide you through the development of many models in PyTorch, showing you why PyTorch makes it much easier and more intuitive to build models in Python: autograd, dynamic computation graph, model classes and much, much more.

We will build, step-by-step, not only the models themselves but also your understanding as I show you both the reasoning behind the code and how to avoid some common pitfalls and errors along the way.

I wrote this book for beginners in general - not only PyTorch beginners. Every now and then I will spend some time explaining some fundamental concepts which I believe are key to have a proper understanding of what's going on in the code.

Maybe you already know well some of those concepts: if this is the case, you can simply skip them, since I've made those explanations as independent as possible from the rest of the content.

About the Author

Daniel Voigt Godoy

@dvgodoy

Daniel has been teaching machine learning and distributed computing technologies at Data Science Retreat, the longest-running Berlin-based bootcamp, for more than three years, helping more than 150 students advance their careers.

He writes regularly for Towards Data Science. His blog post "Understanding PyTorch with an example: a step-by-step tutorial" reached more than 220,000 views since it was published.

The positive feedback from the readers resulted in an invitation to speak at the Open Data Science Conference (ODSC) Europe in 2019. It also motivated him to write the book "Deep Learning with PyTorch Step-by-Step", which covers a broader range of topics.

Daniel is also the main contributor of two python packages: HandySpark and DeepReplay.

His professional background includes 20 years of experience working for companies in several industries: banking, government, fintech, retail and mobility.