Gary Smith (2) (1945–)

Remember all those books hyping machine learning and neural networks? This is the opposite but equally vacuous. I lost count of how many times the author uses random data to prove algorithms can be fooled. We get it. You don't need a book to make a simple argument like that. The rest is just the author being grumpy and glorifying human intelligence.

This book was well thought out, flowed well, contained many relevant examples, and was not overly technical. Many times with math books, the writing can be cryptic and authors launch into tangents that nobody understands. Not so with this book. It teaches interesting topics in relevant and straightforward ways. One or two of the author's explanations were somewhat confusing, but upon a second reading things became clear.