Reinforcement Learning with Python: A Hands-On Guide to Building Intelligent Agents from Scratch - Softcover

Fenn, Alyssa

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798275136050

Publisher: Independently published, 2025

Synopsis

What You Will Learn

The foundations of RL made simple

Agents, environments, states, actions, rewards, value functions, and the full learning loop—broken down through diagrams, analogies, and intuitive examples.

Tabular methods you can master in one sitting

Multi-Armed Bandits, Epsilon-Greedy, Q-Learning, SARSA, TD(λ), and complete MountainCar and FrozenLake projects.

Deep Reinforcement Learning the right way

Build Deep Q-Networks (DQN) with Replay Buffers, Target Networks, Double/Dueling DQN, Prioritized Replay, and more using clean PyTorch code.

Advanced policy-gradient methods used in modern RL

REINFORCE, Advantage Estimation, Actor-Critic, A2C, A3C, DDPG, TD3, and Soft Actor–Critic (SAC), all taught through clear intuition and end-to-end training scripts.

PPO — the industry’s most popular RL algorithm

Understand why it works, how policy clipping stabilizes training, and implement it step-by-step.

Build your own custom RL environments

Including GridWorld, simplified trading simulations, and fully custom reward systems.

Practical debugging, tuning, and best practices

Reward shaping, normalization, exploration strategies, hyperparameter tuning, vectorized environments, and code modularity.

Deploy real RL systems

Save and load models, serve decisions via APIs, monitor performance in production, detect drift, run agents in the cloud, and perform continual learning.

Explore cutting-edge RL research

Meta-learning, hierarchical RL, model-based approaches, multi-agent systems, RLHF, and how large language models use RL internally.

Who This Book Is For

• Python developers who want to expand into AI and RL

• Students learning machine learning or preparing for research

• Data scientists wanting deeper intuition beyond supervised learning

• Engineers building automation, robotics, or simulation-based systems

• Anyone who wants to create real intelligent agents—not toy examples

No advanced math or prerequisites required.
Everything is explained clearly, visually, and step-by-step.

Hands-On Projects Included

You’ll build intelligent agents for:

• CartPole (10-line starter agent)

• MountainCar with tabular Q-Learning

• DQN for Atari / Breakout

• PPO for continuous-control tasks

• DDPG in Pendulum-v1

• GridWorld and custom game environments

• A simplified trading bot

• Real-world deployment pipeline examples

Every project includes full annotated Python code and complete implementation walkthroughs.

Why This Book Works

This book cuts through complexity and gives you:

• Real-world examples instead of abstract theory

• Text-based diagrams for instant understanding

• Clean PyTorch code you can reuse in your projects

• A learning experience that feels like a hands-on mentorship

• A complete, intuitive roadmap from beginner to advanced RL

By the end, you won’t just understand reinforcement learning—
you will be able to build, explain, debug, improve, and deploy RL agents like a true practitioner.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798275136050
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 340