Lesson 1 - Beginner guidance/help

Part 1 2022
1

I am new to this course. I went through the video and read chapter 1 of the book. I am at the point where I saved the Is it a Bird? book and I am not sure what is the goal of the lesson. Am I suppose to run each cell of the book saved version? The instructions mention to do our own image search, how to do this?
How do you test the model with a new picture.

I would appreciate if you can point me in the right direction to make sure that I am doing the course right prior to continue with another lesson; and what are the basic knowledge you need to have for this course.

Thanks!

2

Hi Sam,

i was in the same position as you just a few weeks ago!

Have you seen Lesson 0 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGxe2mN3kAg

that will answer a lot of your questions i think

3

Thanks Ian!
In the topics I don’t see a lesson 0. I hope we are referring to the same program.

4

Make sure you’re doing the latest version of the ourse too:

5

well ‘lesson 0’ is more an introduction and ‘how to’ guide to the rest of the course, its not listed in th e program, not sure why! I had done a few lessons before i came across lesson 0, after watching it i went back to the start…

6

Got you!
For clarification is fastai/course22 the second part of the course; or are you saying there is a more up to date version of the Practical Deep Learning course?
I have done coding in the past in other languages but I do not code at the present - do you recommend getting more familiar with Python first, or learn it as I go along the course material?

Thanks!

7

course22 is the latest and most up to date version. I was looking at an older version myself to begin with

I would recommend that you just crack on, the various python libraries are introduced as the course progresses, so you dont really need to do any prior learning, in fact @jeremy actively encourages new students to get stuck into building things first and gaining knowledge and deeper understanding as you go…

8

Thanks again for your help - I will get on with lesson 0!

1 Like
9

Hi Ian:
I went through lesson 0 and Jeremy is explaining how to setup Colab:
image
The link that I used for the course does not show the same menu options as in lesson 0 and it also indicates in the section “How to complete lesson 1” to get setup with Kaggle - no mention of Colab; adding a bit of confusion of what to follow.
Can you please clarify - thanks!

1 Like
10

Hey Sam,

this is the course I am following:

and the accompanying notebooks are the in the GitHub repo I linked to before:

I am following along on my own laptop so I used this repo to help with setup:

AFAIK this is the latest version of the course, this is now the ‘Part 1’ and I think that ‘Part 2’ is still WIP…

Hope this helps!

11

just a thought - I dont think there is necessarily a right or a wrong way to do any of this, particularly at this stage of the learning journey. I am not very experienced with Python and Jupyter, but I am a pretty experienced developer. There is an philosophy from one of the pioneers of modern coding - a guy called Kent Beck - that is ‘Make it work, make it right, make it fast’. I think we are both in the ‘make it work’ stage right now I think!

12

I was confused as well @SAM2023 . I am also following the same course that @irh76 linked too but you are correct that the Lesson 0 seems to be referencing something different. I think Lesson 0 is from a couple years ago and the course has updated since then. The principles seem to apply to the new course, but the specifics of what it is talking about (i.e it talks about codeLab and has a different table of contents), are a bit different.

13

Thanks for your replies. I guess I will continue with the learning process - hopefully it will get better as the course progresses.
What references do you guys used to learn more about what the code is doing in each of the code cells in the book - to learn more about the syntax ?
I tried the doc"function_name" as indicated in the lesson instructions but I got an error “Object not found” as a result.

14

You can read the docs:

Or open the Book notebooks in Colab directly via links in the readme:

Where the doc function does work:

Screen Shot 2023-08-29 at 1.00.58 AM
Screen Shot 2023-08-29 at 1.00.58 AM2682×1574 384 KB

15

I appreciate the information!!

16

It should be doc(function_name)

17

Hey there,
You can do the Lesson 0 to get the idea of navigating and getting the most out of the course,

Other than that you can test the code from the course repo.
Or try to code the whole thing by yourself locally

The lesson 0 youll find over youtube, it was a part of the old iterations of the course but it will be relevant in this course too