As a noob on this subject, I have found the following two books very helpful for understanding ANNs;
1) Neural Networks for Applied Sciences and Engineering: From Fundamentals to Complex Pattern Recognition by Sandhya Samarasinghe. - A very nice, intuitive and comprehensible book with lots of illustrations.
2) Practical Neural Network Recipes in C++ by Timothy Masters - A old classic with step-by-step code you can follow.
1) Neural Networks for Applied Sciences and Engineering: From Fundamentals to Complex Pattern Recognition by Sandhya Samarasinghe. - A very nice, intuitive and comprehensible book with lots of illustrations.
2) Practical Neural Network Recipes in C++ by Timothy Masters - A old classic with step-by-step code you can follow.