Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book
Review: When I came across this book, I had already read several on the subject, including Beale & Jackson (lightweight) and Haykin (middleweight)

For a reader unafraid of basic statistics and linear algebra, this is an excellent beginning book. For the math wary, I would say read a math-lite conceptual book first. This was a text book in my master's program, and I heard from students with a weak math background that they found it extremely challenging.

Bishop rightly emphasizes the statistical foundations of feedforward networks. This is a large subject in and of itself, and he covers it well. It provides an extremely solid foundation.

Neural dynamics via recurrence, Hopfield Nets, and many other topics outside or on the edges of feedforward networks are not covered.

I find many NN books are poorly written, imprecise, and have little content. This is one of the best books I have read on the subject.