I'm getting into coding because I've always been interested in it. I've watched videos about neural networks and other areas of artificial intelligence, and they look really fascinating. My school is currently teaching basic Python, so I'm wondering how difficult it would be to start learning neural networks and what programming, math, and other fundamentals I should study first. I'll be entering my junior year of high school and haven't taken calculus yet.
4 Answers
A practical first project is recognizing handwritten digits with the MNIST dataset. It’s a common beginner exercise that lets you learn about training data, predictions, and simple neural networks without requiring an enormous amount of code. Before that, make sure you understand Python fundamentals and basic data handling.
Start by building a solid programming foundation. Python is the best language to continue with because it’s widely used for data science and machine learning. Focus on writing small projects, understanding functions, data structures, and debugging before jumping into advanced AI. You can learn another language such as C later, but it isn’t necessary for getting started with neural networks.
A lot of beginners skip the math and then get confused when they try to understand what the models are actually doing. You don’t need advanced math immediately, but learning the basics will help a lot.
Neural networks are advanced, but you don’t have to wait until graduate school to explore them. You can begin with beginner-friendly tutorials once you’re comfortable with Python. Just expect to learn the concepts gradually instead of trying to understand every advanced detail at once.
That makes sense. I’m not expecting to master everything right away—I mainly want to know what I should learn first.
For the math, start with algebra and the basics of vectors and matrices. Some introductory statistics is also useful, especially averages, probability, distributions, and regression. Calculus becomes more important for understanding how neural networks are trained, but you can begin learning and experimenting before taking a calculus course.
What kind of math should I study? I’m going into my junior year, so I haven’t taken calculus yet. How much coding should I know before starting, and should I focus only on Python for now?