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Tutorials

A tutorial is a lesson. It takes a reader who does not yet know the subject and walks them through building one working thing, end to end, making every decision for them along the way.

This section is empty

That is a gap, not an oversight, and it is recorded here rather than hidden. Nothing in this hub currently takes a reader from nothing to a working network in a single guided pass — the material that exists explains the mathematics and documents the implementations, both of which assume a reader who already knows what they are building.

The first tutorial should be the construction of an L-layer network from scratch: initialise the parameters, implement one forward pass, derive and implement one backward pass, verify the gradients numerically, then train it on a small problem the reader can watch converge. The forward- and backward-propagation derivation it draws on is already written; what is missing is the guided path through it.

Writing that tutorial is a content project rather than a documentation move, so it is deliberately out of scope for the restructuring that created this section.

What belongs here

A page belongs in this section when a beginner following it in order arrives at something that works.

  • It has a single, stated destination, and reaching it is the point.
  • It is safe to follow without judgment: every choice is made for the reader, and none of them are presented as options.
  • It is complete. A tutorial that leaves a reader with a broken artifact has failed even if every individual step was correct.
  • It shows results at each step, so a reader can tell they are still on track.

What does not belong here

  • A task with a goal the reader already has. That is a how-to guide. The distinction is who chose the destination: in a tutorial the author did, in a how-to the reader did.
  • The reasoning behind a design. That is an explanation. A tutorial may say "use He initialisation here"; it should not stop to derive why the variance scales that way.
  • A catalogue of options, parameters, or defaults. That is reference. A tutorial names the one value it wants the reader to type.
  • A lesson that assumes prior familiarity with its own subject. That is not a tutorial at all, and it is usually a how-to guide in the wrong section.