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Everyone and welcome back to this class.

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This is a short lecture I like to give in each of my courses on how to succeed in this course.

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This is very important to talk about because you're learning a difficult technical subject.

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It's easy to get stuck or even worse give up because you're just not getting things.

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Maybe there are too many gaps in your knowledge so you can't connect the dots.

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Maybe some assumptions you've made is incorrect.

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And keep in mind there's a lot of material in this course.

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It can be overwhelming if you're new to this field of study and you're not familiar with the conventions

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any typical patterns we use.

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Now if you've already seen this lecture in the past you're more than welcome to skip it if you remember

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what's in it and you're already using these guidelines.

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The first guideline is this remember that I want you to succeed.

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In fact that's why I'm giving you these guidelines in the first place.

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So if at any point when you're watching these lectures and you become confused just ask on the Q and

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A also known as the discussion forum typically I respond within hours sometimes even within minutes

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if I happen to be on the site.

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And I see a notification.

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I answer any and all questions.

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So even if you think it's stupid just ask anyway.

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One example I get from time to time is where do I get the code for this course.

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And of course my answer is typically well it's in the lecture called where to get the code for this

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course at the end of the day.

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No one cares if your question was trivial or silly if it's something keeping you from progressing in

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the course I want to answer it

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now very rarely I get people saying well I was so confused that I couldn't even think of the right question

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ask and this is where you have to take some responsibility for your own learning.

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You have to ask yourself what did the instructor assume I know that I didn't actually know.

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Maybe I can look into those things and that will help me formulate a question.

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Maybe there's some background knowledge I'm missing a lot of people like to have exercises to practice

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when they're taking a course.

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The act of thinking of the right question to ask is itself an exercise.

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It might not be the type of exercise you thought you'd be doing but in many ways this is more profound.

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This is an exercise that requires you to think and to change how you think.

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And ultimately that is the best value you can get out of a course.

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Speaking of background knowledge this is one of the most important guidelines in this lecture.

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You may have noticed that in the course description I've listed some prerequisites or in other words

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things you should know before starting this course.

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Now you might wonder why do I ask you to know these things.

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Why don't I just teach them in the course.

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And while we do review some topics in this course it's not the focus.

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There's such a wide variety of students in this course.

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Students from almost every country in the world.

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Students of all ages students of all backgrounds.

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What does this mean.

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That means what's review for one person is going to be totally new for another.

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Some people are going to tell me they don't know calculus.

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Some people are going to be very far behind with their Python programming skills

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but if we start teaching Python programming skills other people are going to say hey why are we doing

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Python.

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Isn't the topic of this course deep learning and I tend to agree that we should stay on topic.

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So how can we reconcile this.

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Well it doesn't make sense for me to give you an entire computer science education in this one course

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because a lot of that would be irrelevant for a lot of people.

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The only logical thing to do is for all of us to meet at a common meeting point.

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How is that point defined.

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Well it's defined by the course prerequisites.

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In fact they are so important that in certain instances I've listed the course prerequisites twice just

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in case you missed it the first time.

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And I'm also reminding you now for good measure.

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Now one pitfall is that people sometimes assume they know things that they don't really know.

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So if you took calculus 20 years ago and you got a C and you skipped class and the times that you did

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show up for class you were sleeping well probably you don't know that much calculus.

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But remember I want you to succeed.

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I want you to be able to learn this material.

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I can point you to resources where you can pick up this missing background knowledge but the key is

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you have to ask in some cases there are certain places where I'm not allowed to post certain links.

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So we have to be mindful of the rules of the platform we are using

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now.

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Occasionally people ask me Well why don't you just teach a course for pure beginners.

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Why don't you teach these courses in such a way that they don't require lots of math and lots of prerequisites.

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Well I don't want to turn this into an easy beginners type of course because for one that's not what

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I'm interested in personally.

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And number two Don't forget that this is State of the art stuff State of the art generally isn't easy.

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And if it were easy that would mean everyone is doing it.

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And if a thousand other people can do the same thing as you.

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Well what's a potential employer going to think what are your chances of getting that job when all 1000

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of you have the exact same skills so we don't want skills that are easy to get.

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We want skills that are hard to get skills that puts you at the top of your game skills that not many

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people have.

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If I'm hiring someone I want the guy who stands out at the guy who says the same thing as everyone else.

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Finally the final guideline for how to succeed in this course.

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I mentioned earlier that there's a lot of material so much that it can be hard to keep track of.

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In addition to taking your own notes and doing all the derivations yourself how can you be absolutely

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sure you're understanding this material.

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I would in fact consider this even more important than the derivations.

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Not everyone is going to be a pro at math.

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So it's understandable if you want to skip a few steps.

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Sometimes it's possible to compartmentalize some concepts or delegate learning them for some other time

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but still understanding be high level picture and how it fits in with everything else what you cannot

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skip is the implementation.

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Implementing these algorithms in code is the real test for whether or not you understand the material

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and this is not about reinventing the wheel or that you shouldn't roll your own whatever because someone

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else out there can do it better than you.

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That is a software engineering principle not a principle of learning in production.

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You don't want to write your own hash map or your own string class and yet what do we usually do as

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an exercise in a typical Intro to Computer Science class.

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Well we do precisely that.

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We implement hash maps and we implement strings.

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And why do we do this.

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Because we want to have a better understanding of how these things work.

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If you make an assumption that's incorrect.

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Well your code is probably just not going to work.

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Merely using a hash map and using a string only gives you a very superficial understanding.

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That's beginner's stuff that stuff everyone knows that's not stuff that's going to help you stand out

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from the competition.

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And it's true that you'll never use your own homemade hash map or your own homemade string in any code

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you write unless of course you are a professional that focuses on that sort of thing.

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They'll probably be inefficient and they'll probably have bugs but that's OK because you're not doing

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it to make it perfect.

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You're doing it to learn you'll notice that the general pattern that this course follows is that we

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always discuss theory and then we implement that theory in code so we're always going from theory to

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code implementing everything that we learned if you can try to implement something before watching the

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coding lecture in the appendix.

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I have a lecture called how to code by yourself.

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That goes much more in-depth into this topic along with multiple strategies for how to approach implementation

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exercises

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So to summarize.

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These are the guidelines I think are going to help you succeed in this course.

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Number one make generous use of the Q and A even when you can't think of the right question ask number

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two make sure you meet the prerequisites to this course.

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If you're not sure what they are or you're not sure how C guideline number one.

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Number three.

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Try your best implement everything we learned.

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This is the true test for whether or not you understand something.

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Remember that it's perfectly normal to get stuck once in a while I get stuck all the time when I'm learning.

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That doesn't mean I'm not smart nor does it mean the book or video I'm learning from is bad.

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It means that there's a disconnect between what the author believes I knew and what I actually know

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and as a learner I do my best to close that gap a good skill to have is learning how to compartmentalize

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concepts.

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So here are the things I understand.

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Here are the things I don't understand.

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But here are the things I understand about the things I don't understand.

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And these are the holes so you know what you're missing and you know where they fit.

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And you can work to fill in those gaps over time one thing I've been doing quite a bit recently is adding

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review lectures to my courses.

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These are meant to teach you everything from scratch since that's going to take you a long time but

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they are meant to help you recall certain things you may have forgotten.

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So if you have an idea for a review lecture that you'd like to see added to this course please feel

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free to make a suggestion using the Q and A.