The parent seems to be coming from a skewed background. Most of his suggestions are way too low level. It's like telling a software engineer they must first write an operating system before they can write a web app.

Learn Theano, TensorFlow, and maybe Torch. They'll handle the low level details for you. You just have to know some math to use them.

If you just want to dive in and be immediately productive, you'd be hard pressed to do better than sci-kit learn and keras (for machine learning / deep learning respectively)