What is TensorFlow (TF)?

TensorFlow is a powerful open-source software library developed by the Google Brain Team for deep neural networks, the topic covered in this book. It was first made available under the Apache 2.0 License in November 2015 and has since grown rapidly; as of May 2022, its GitHub repository (https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow) has more than 129,000 commits, with roughly 3,100 contributors. This in itself provides a measure of the popularity of TensorFlow.

Let us first learn what exactly TensorFlow is and why it is so popular among deep neural network researchers and engineers. Google calls it “an open-source software library for machine intelligence,” but since there are so many other deep learning libraries like PyTorch (https://pytorch.org/), Caffe (https://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/), and MXNet (https://mxnet.apache.org/), what makes TensorFlow special? Most other deep learning libraries, like TensorFlow, have auto-differentiation (a...