Primer on Neural Nets

Michael Nielsen is writing a book on neural nets and deep learning and he's posting chapters to the web. You can access the first chapter here, which uses the recognition of hand-written numerals as its problem domain. You can get access to the rest of the chapters by contributing to his Indigogo campaign.
About Michael Nielsen:

My work is motivated by the creation of tools to help people think better, either individually or in groups. Put another way, I’m interested in cognitive tools and in collective intelligence. 

Open science 

I believe that publicly funded science should be open science, and from 2008-2012 I worked as an advocate for open science. You can get the flavor of my work on open science from my talk at ted.com, or in my op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. I’ve developed these ideas at length in my essay on The Future of Science and in other essays. I’ve also written a book about collective intelligence and open science. It was named one of the best books of 2011 by the Financial Times and by the Boston Globe...