This curriculum provides an overview of free online resources for learning about deep learning. It includes courses, books, and even important people to follow.
If you only want to do one thing, do this:
Train an MNIST network with PyTorch.
https://github.com/pytorch/examples/tree/master/mnist
https://cs231n.github.io/
https://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pift6266/H10/notes/gradient.html
https://fullstackdeeplearning.com/
https://www.deeplearningbook.org
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.0850v5.pdf
http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/lenet.html
CS224d: Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing: http://cs224d.stanford.edu
Word2Vec: https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/text/word2vec
Often, the easiest way to build a mental model of a field is to read the work of the important contributors in chronological order. This is a helpful list of important players in the field of deep learning.
Geoff Hinton (University of Toronto)
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/
Andrew Ng (Stanford, Coursera, Baidu, Landing AI)
Worked with Jeff Dean + Hinton @ Google's "Google Brain Team"
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/ang/
Yann LeCun (Courant Institute NYU, now Meta) - Specializes in Convnets
http://yann.lecun.com/
Yoshua Bengio (University de Montreal) - I love his work and papers, very easy to read.
Keywords: manifold learning and representation learning.
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/yoshua_en/index.html
Ian Goodfellow - invented GANs (yea)
https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=iYN86KEAAAAJ&hl=en
Andrej Karpathy (Tesla’s AI head) - great work with CNNs
https://karpathy.ai
Alex Graves - great work with LSTMs, Neural Turing Machines, Differentiable Neural Computer
https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=DaFHynwAAAAJ&hl=en
Oriol Vinyols - co-author of seq2seq learning and knowledge distillation
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NkzyCvUAAAAJ&hl=en
To Recognize Shapes, First Learn to Generate Images
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~fritz/absps/montrealTR.pdf
Practical recommendations for gradient-based training of deep architectures
http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.5533
Bengio's Representation Learning
http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.5538
Ng's Large Scale Learning Paper
http://ai.stanford.edu/~ang/papers/icml12-HighLevelFeaturesUsingUnsupervisedLearning.pdf
Thumbnail is Figure 4 from the original AlexNet paper: ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks.