The english version has been completely overhauled, the entire manuscript got a dedicated reference implementation (SNIPE), a brand-new resilient propagation section and much more. It's winter term (at least in Germany) and there is a new major release of my manuscript “A Brief Introduction to Neural Networks”. As usual, it is available for download here.

1. The English version has been thoroughly and completely overhauled. Almost every single sentence has been touched. Lots and lots of still present German werds have been removed, clumsy speech has been removed, paragraphs rewritten. Lots of thanks go to Sebastian Merzbach!
2. SNIPE has been integrated into the manuscript in form of an official reference implementation. In particular throughout chapters 3, 4 and 5 are lots of special shaded paragraphs who guide the reader how to implement their context using Snipe. Despite the easy handling of Snipe classes and methods due to their speaking names, Snipe is really fast and efficient due to its original goal of implementation. Therefore, I hope that the learning success of those readers who read my manuscript for later implementation of neural networks is increased significantly.
3. The text has been cleaned of unneccessary style elements, e.g. environments like “remark” or “example” have been removed. They were still a relict of the times when I tried out lots of things in latex. Of course, the contents of those environments are still there, however the unneccessary structural elements that have been there every few paragraphs are now gone.
4. Chapter 5: A new section deals with the learning procedure Resilient Propagation as an extensioon of Backpropagatioon fo Error. The arrangement of this chapter has been overworked as well.
5. Chapters 3, 4, 5: Definitions have been straightened, as well as the text has been.
6. The preface has been shortened, straightened and more clearly deals with how to read the manuscript in a senseful way.
7. The cover has been slightly renewed and now, there is a nice QR code.
8. Lots and lots of small errors have been removed right across the entire manuscript, just because readers sent me e-mails – among those also were technical errors. For example, some diacritical letters could not be found via full-text search, a bug which has been solved.

In particular to the last bullet point I have to state how encouraging your e-mails are. In the mean time, I have been getting e-mails from readers several times a week, providing me feed-back, correcting typos, asking interesting questions or just commendations.

I want to encourage everybody to continue writing me e-mails, because it keeps up my motivation in writing. Every little error you guys are mailing me will be added to my big manuscript todo list and will be implemented in the next release, if appropriate. And of course, you get an answer.

Thanks, and let's continue the good work!