Learning TensorFlow.js - Book Review

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2021-05-28 23:00:08

I was delighted to get an advance copy of Gant Laborde’s “Learning TensorFlow.js” from O’Reilly and privileged to have written the foreword.

Gant has done something special with this book. In just 300 pages, he takes you end-to-end, in-depth through everything you need to know from an introduction to AI, understanding tensors, using them in the browser, deploying them, and more.

It ends with a capstone project (what a great idea, I might have to steal it for my next book!), where you can use Machine Learning to convert an image into a set of dice, like this:

I love this book because it is for a different audience than the traditional ML one. It starts with a great introduction to AI and then tells you about TensorFlow.js and how you can use it to build Machine Learning apps. Then, the mystery of Tensors is cracked open, and Gant leads you through some detailed examples of how you can convert images into Tensors for training and inference.

First, you can find an existing model from TensorFlow Hub, and in Chapter 5, Gant leads you through using the inception model in JavaScript. Inception isn’t any toy model, though – it is a Convolutional Neural Network designed for image analysis and object detection. It’s not that long ago that it was state-of-the-art in research. And now it’s available in JavaScript!