01/10/2020 7 Free eBooks every Data Scientist should read in 2020 | by Roman Orac | Sep, 2020 | Towards Data

| Sep, 2020 | Towards Data Science

7 Free eBooks every Data Scientist should read

in 2020
Learning a new skill doesn’t have to be expensive. You only need time and dedication to learn a
new skill in 2020.

Roman Orac
Sep 21 · 5 min read

Photo by Kuma Kum on Unsplash

T here are many great online resources to learn Data Science. Some free others
paid. There are also expensive college programs dedicated to studying Artificial
Intelligence. Which one should you choose?

Let me tell you a secret. Learning a new skill doesn’t have to be expensive. To learn a
new skill in 2020, you only need time and dedication.

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01/10/2020 7 Free eBooks every Data Scientist should read in 2020 | by Roman Orac | Sep, 2020 | Towards Data Science

In this article, I’ve compiled a list of 7 free eBooks that will help you learn Data Science
and Machine Learning. Keep on learning!

You only need time and dedication to learn a new

skill in 2020
In case you would like to invest in yourself check the following courses:

- Intro to Machine Learning

- Intro to Programming

- Data Science for Business Leaders

- AI for Healthcare

- Autonomous Systems

- Learn SQL

- Udacity Programs

- Your First Machine Learning Model in the Cloud

Disclosure: Bear in mind that some of the links above are affiliate links and if you go
through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission. Keep in mind that I link
Udacity programs and my tutorials because of their quality and not because of the
commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you
decide to buy something is completely up to you.

1. Deep Learning
Authors: Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville

Deep Learning book was originally released in 2016 as one of the first books dedicated
to the field of Deep Learning. It was written by a team of standout researchers at the
forefront of developments at the time and has remained a highly influential and
regarded work in deep neural networks.

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01/10/2020 7 Free eBooks every Data Scientist should read in 2020 | by Roman Orac | Sep, 2020 | Towards Data Science

This is a bottom-up, theory-heavy treatise on Deep Learning. This is not a book full of
code and corresponding comments, or a surface-level hand-wavy overview of neural
networks. This is an in-depth mathematics-based explanation of the field.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

2. Dive into Deep Learning

Authors: Aston Zhang, Zack C. Lipton, Mu Li, Alex J. Smola

Dive Into Deep Learning is an interactive Deep Learning book with code, math, and
discussions. It provides NumPy/MXNet, PyTorch, and TensorFlow implementations.
The authors are Amazon employees who use Amazon’s MXNet library to teach Deep
Learning. The book is being regularly updated so be sure you’re reading the latest
version.

Zachary Lipton puts it nicely:

What makes Dive into Deep Learning (D2K) unique is that we went so far with the idea of
learning by doing that the entire book itself consists of runnable code. We tried to combine
the best aspects of a textbook (clarity and math) with the best aspects of hands-on tutorials
(practical skills, reference code, implementation tricks, and intuition). Each chapter

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01/10/2020 7 Free eBooks every Data Scientist should read in 2020 | by Roman Orac | Sep, 2020 | Towards Data Science

section teaches a single key idea through multiple modalities, interweaving prose, math,
and a self-contained implementation that can easily be grabbed and modified to give your
projects a running start. We think this approach is essential for teaching deep learning
because so much of the core knowledge in deep learning is derived from experimentation
(vs. first principles).

Photo by Perfecto Capucine on Unsplash

3. Machine Learning Yearning

Author: Andrew Ng

This book was written by Andrew Ng, a professor at Stanford University and a pioneer
in online education. He also co-founded Coursera and deeplearning.ai.

Machine Learning Yearning book focuses on teaching how to make ML algorithms work
(not on teaching ML algorithms). It prioritizes the most promising directions for an AI
project.

This book is a gem of useful information that will help you solve problems in practice,
like diagnosing errors in ML systems, how to apply end-to-end learning, transfer
learning, and multi-task learning, etc.

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01/10/2020 7 Free eBooks every Data Scientist should read in 2020 | by Roman Orac | Sep, 2020 | Towards Data Science

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

4. Interpretable Machine Learning

Subtitle: A Guide for Making Black Box Models Explainable
Author: Christoph Molnar

This book uses a “Pay what you want pricing strategy” so it is technically not free.

Interpretable Machine Learning focuses on ML models for tabular data (also called
relational or structured data) and less on computer vision and natural language
processing tasks.

Reading the book is recommended for machine learning practitioners, data scientists,
statisticians, and anyone else interested in making machine learning models
interpretable. It details how to select and apply the best interpretation methods for a
machine learning project.

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01/10/2020 7 Free eBooks every Data Scientist should read in 2020 | by Roman Orac | Sep, 2020 | Towards Data Science

Photo by Lucas Benjamin on Unsplash

5. Bayesian Methods for Hackers

Author: Cameron Davidson

Bayesian Methods for Hackers is not technically a Machine Learning book as it focuses
on an important field of Data Science called Bayesian inference.

Bayesian Methods for Hackers is designed as an introduction to Bayesian inference

from a computational/understanding-first, and mathematics-second, point of view. It is
aimed at enthusiast with a less mathematical background or one who is not interested
in mathematics but simply the practice of Bayesian methods, this text should be
sufficient and entertaining.

This book is also a great resource to learn PyMC, the probabilistic programming
language in Python.

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01/10/2020 7 Free eBooks every Data Scientist should read in 2020 | by Roman Orac | Sep, 2020 | Towards Data Science

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

6. Python Data Science Handbook

Author: Jake VanderPlas

Python Data Science Handbook is aimed at junior Data Scientists. It shows how to use
the most important tools, including IPython, NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Scikit-Learn,
and many others. This book is perfect for tackling day-to-day issues such as cleaning,
manipulating, and transforming data — or building machine learning models.

Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash

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01/10/2020 7 Free eBooks every Data Scientist should read in 2020 | by Roman Orac | Sep, 2020 | Towards Data Science

7. An Introduction to Statistical Learning

Subtitle: with Applications in R
Authors: Gareth James, Daniela Witten, Trevor Hastie and Robert Tibshirani

An Introduction to Statistical Learning provides an introduction to statistical learning

methods. It is aimed at upper-level undergraduate students, masters students and Ph.D.
students in the non-mathematical sciences. The book also contains a number of R labs
with detailed explanations on how to implement the various methods in real-life
settings and should be a valuable resource for a practicing data scientist.

Before you go
I am building an online business focused on Data Science. I tweet about how I’m doing
it. Follow me there to join me on my journey.

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