The fast.ai course that taught coders to stop fearing neural nets

What it does

This repository contains the Jupyter notebooks for the third edition of Practical Deep Learning for Coders, fast.ai’s introductory deep learning course. The lessons live in the nbs folder and are written against the legacy fastai1 library. The README makes clear this is no longer the active version of the course.

The interesting bit

Because the notebooks are pinned to fastai1, the repo functions as a time capsule of both the curriculum and the framework’s API from that era. The maintainers explicitly redirect new students to fastbook, so this is now reference material rather than a living syllabus.

Key highlights

• Complete Part 1 course notebooks for “Practical Deep Learning for Coders”
• Built for the legacy fastai1 branch; incompatible with modern fastai
• 4,914 stars indicate it was a popular starting point for the fast.ai community
• README points newcomers to the current fastbook repository for up-to-date lessons

Caveats

• Requires the legacy fastai1 library; the latest fastai will not work.
• Explicitly deprecated: the README states this is not the latest version of Part 1.

Verdict

Useful if you are debugging legacy fastai1 code or tracing the evolution of the framework, but anyone starting fresh should head straight to fastbook.