I've been self-learning Python for 3 months, especially interested in LLMs. What are the right methods? Should I dive straight into practice or strengthen my theoretical foundations first? Which resources (books, courses, projects) would be more effective? Where should I start?
How should one generally progress with LLMs?
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For your situation—three months into self-learning Python with a focus on LLMs—you're at that inflection point where the balance between theory and practice really matters. If you dive straight into cutting-edge LLM papers or Hugging Face examples right now, you might get lost in the complexity without understanding why things work the way they do. But if you spend another six months just on theory, you might not build the intuition needed to debug or innovate. Your best bet is to layer them: use targeted theory to inform immediate, focused practice.
Start with the *mechanical* parts first—Python libraries like `transformers`, `torch`, and `datasets` are your tools, not theories. Pick a small project (e.g., fine-tuning a tiny model on a custom dataset or building a simple chatbot) to force yourself to understand tokenization, embeddings, and attention in practice. Then, when you hit a snag, go *just deep enough* into the relevant theory (e.g., "Why does my model lose coherence? Maybe it’s gradient vanishing—let’s read the original Transformer paper’s section on residual connections"). This way, you’re learning in context.
For resources, prioritize hands-on ones that give theoretical depth *on demand*. Stanford’s *CS224N* lectures (free on YouTube) are gold for NLP fundamentals, but don’t try to absorb everything at once—watch the attention and RNN videos, then skim the papers cited. Ian Goodfellow’s *Deep Learning* book is great for foundational math, but keep it as a reference. Meanwhile, Hugging Face’s *Trainer* and *PEFT* tutorials are perfect for rapid practice—mess around with LoRA on a small model and see how training dynamics change.
Your first milestone should be: *"I can fine-tune a small LLM on a custom dataset and explain the key hyperparameters’ impact."* That’s practical, measurable, and forces you to touch theory where it matters. Once you hit that, you’ll know *exactly* where your gaps are—and whether you need to revisit backpropagation math or focus on scaling laws.