I'm a practicing data scientist, and I'm writing this book keeping other practicing data scientists and machine learning engineers in mind. If you're a software engineer applying deep learning, this book is also for you.

If you're a deep learning researcher, then this book isn't really for you; however, you should still pick up a copy so that you can criticize the lack of proofs and mathematical rigor in this book.

If you're an academic or educator, then this book is definitely for you. I've taught a survey source in data science at the University of Illinois at Springfield (go Prairie Stars!) for the past 3 years, and in doing so, I've had the opportunity to inspire a number of future machine learning people. This experience has inspired me to create this book. I think a book like this is a great way to help students build interest in a very complex topic.