Applying Neural Networks not only is a good review of the types of neural networks and and excellent discussion of how to design and implement them. It not only teaches how to select the type of neural net to use. What I loved most about this book was that it discussed with insightful, vivid details how to plan for, conceptualize, and prepare the neural net project long before selecting the actual type of network. It tells how and why to make the inquiries and choices you must make starting very early and at each stage of project development. For example, it discusses how to prepare data, how to choose data types, how to scale it, how to collect it, validation of it, data quality checking, and encoding it. Data quality and preparation are important keys to neural network success, like ingredients-preparation in cooking. Swingler shows why in an easy-to-understand manner. The book also discusses how to select project variables, outlier removal, the tradeoffs involved in network parameter selections, building training and test data, how to analyze outputs and errors, how to set stop-training criteria (and a host of other thresholds), how to visualize training data and error distributions in 2D and 3D, what derivatives are and what they mean, how to do project maintenance, how to adapt the network to external changes, and total project management. Some very good examples of neural network projects illustrate how various researchers implemented these choices. This book will tell you how to make some excellent choices in the design and running of a neural network project, as well as teach you why you are selecting between the alternatives. It is the only true,in-depth neural network methodology book I have found.