Similar title: A brief course in modern math for programmers
It does say "This book is not for mathematicians" — or the nit-picking historians of mathematics I imagine... Plus one should not judge a book by its cover or anything written thereon.
Why not? The cover and that things that go on it are as much a part of the book as any other page.
This saying is so outdated and comes from a time when all book covers were essentially the same.
"A bit of linear algebra, calculus and probability/stats" would make you better equipped at leveraging LLM? Or do you mean that having "a bit" of those you would be able to implement/train you own custom LLM to write code for you?
> The cover and that things that go on it are as much a part of the book as any other page.
Indeed, and a book should not be judged by any single page alone. Not the cover, nor page 39.
> This saying is so outdated and comes from a time when all book covers were essentially the same.
If all covers were the same, there would be no temptation to judge the book by it, and thus no reason to invent a saying cautioning against it, so I doubt this history.
Just like the majority of MS Word users do not need to know that the paragraphs are internally represented as XML encapsulated in <x:p> tags.
You seem to conflate the idea of "building models from scratch" together with "using a model created by others to do meaningful work.
We are discussing "tools" here, you do not need to know much about physics or metallurgy or woodworking to use a hammer. And hammer users will outnumber hammer makers by various orders of magnitude.
Same applies to LLMs, IMHO.