If you want a list of college courses that you’ll need to understand the book, here it is:
- Calculus (I, II and III)
- Differential Equations
- Linear Algebra
- Statistics (or a good covering of Bayes)
However, I did just fine in my NN classes without Diff. Eq. and just had to look up concepts I hadn’t studied yet.
You can take the black box approach as above, but if you really want to understand the math and implementation of the networks, you’ll have to study. It’s going to be a steep learning curve to fully grasp the more advanced networks no matter what you do. You can either take the above classes first, or you can start reading the book and look up everything you don’t grasp on wikipedia, and then from those articles read whatever you have to read to understand them, etc. You will find that, either way, you’ll eventually get past that initial peek and things will be easier.
It would be good if you told us why you want to learn neural networks. I’ve not found a single use for them in my professional career, though I’m not a game developer or telecommunications developer.