The Hundred-Page Language Models Book: hands-on with PyTorch (The Hundred-Page Books)

This is a beautifully written text that that guides you on your journey to better understand machine learning. The writing is succinct and the page layout is excellent with clear sections and colored diagrams. The author does a great job explaining both the foundational mathematics, the algorithms and the code snippets. A must have book for machine learning!

I work extensively in Analytics. To understand the opportunities and limitations (we are now using gen AI on a daily basis), I needed to understand the mechanics of these models. So, I was excited on learning that this book was being written and I cannot recommend it enough. This is the third in a series of works, all of which are essential reading.

The book provides a big pile of everything and beyond (remember free online resources) that would help you to get to up to speed with everything about LLM, and around LLM, don't wait just buy if you don't want to stay behind the race, at least with the knowledge.

Parts of this book were easy to understand, others were more difficult, Andriy calmly explained each piece, almost second guessing where Dear Reader might struggle. I admit I needed a bit of help with some of the maths, but that's personal to me as I'm not a regular maths person. LLMs is such a fast-moving, wide, and deep area but somehow Andriy has carved a happy path through the wilderness so us mere mortals can avoid getting stuck in the swamp and barbed by the brambles, and feel like we've not just learned something but accomplished something too. The partnering wiki/code and offer is the icing on the cake. Great job. Unsurprising, because this work reflects the kind of guy I suspect Andriy is (from his X posts!).

I recently read The Hundred-Page Language Models Book by Andriy Burkov, and it’s a great fit for an enthusiast like me—someone with experience but plenty still to learn. At around 150 pages, it’s concise yet covers a lot, from language modeling basics to modern Transformer architectures. It blends theory, math, and practical PyTorch code in a way that’s clear and useful, especially for those of us who enjoy hands-on learning. I appreciated how it tackles real topics like finetuning and model evaluation without getting bogged down. It’s already sparking ideas for my projects, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking to deepen their understanding of language models in a focused, approachable way!

I personally like how Andriy build a ramp in explaining language models starting from basics of ML and NLP, then on to RNN, and then finally to transformers and LLM. This helps readers who wants to dive into the world of LLMs quickly build the required foundational knowledge before exposing them to the inner workings of LLMs. In addition, it comes with Pytorch code examples that aids in understanding key concepts. For readers new to this space, you should probably read it from cover to cover. For others with some experience in ML / AI, this book serves as an extremely handy reference which should be on your bookshelf.

This book is a fantastic resource for anyone wanting to understand the foundations and advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs). What I loved most is how clear and well-structured it is. The author does an excellent job of breaking down complex topics into easy-to-follow explanations, making even the trickiest mathematical concepts feel approachable. The balance between theory and practice is just right - you get both the underlying principles and real-world applications. The visuals - graphs, schemas, and diagrams - really help reinforce key ideas, making everything easier to grasp. Plus, the Python code snippets let you experiment and deepen your understanding, which I found incredibly helpful. The book starts with the basics of language modeling and gradually builds up to advanced topics like transformers and LLMs. This structured approach made it much easier for me to fill in gaps in my NLP and deep learning knowledge. Highly recommended!

Excellent book and excellent author. I highly recommend it.

Very informative book. Knowledge is easily digestible and tough subject well explained. I recommend it to any one interested in subject of language models.