--- title: Backpropagation Explained for Beginners (Part 1):... description: A beginner-friendly introduction to backpropagation in neural networks, building intuition from first principles. Starting from a recap of forward propagation... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/backpropagation-explained-for-beginners-part-1-building-the-intuition-219g21wnz twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Backpropagation Explained for Beginners (Part 1): Building the Intuition | daily.dev og:description: A beginner-friendly introduction to backpropagation in neural networks, building intuition from first principles. Starting from a recap of forward propagation... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/backpropagation-explained-for-beginners-part-1-building-the-intuition-219g21wnz og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/219g21wnz.png og:image:alt: Backpropagation Explained for Beginners (Part 1): Building the Intuition og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Backpropagation Explained for Beginners (Part 1): Building the Intuition **[Towards Data Science](https://daily.dev/sources/tds)** · 13 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A beginner-friendly introduction to backpropagation in neural networks, building intuition from first principles. Starting from a recap of forward propagation and a simple regression dataset, the post explains why neural networks need to learn, introduces the chain rule through simple examples, and derives the partial derivative of the MSE loss with respect to one weight (w1) step by step. The article sets up Part 2, which will cover the full backpropagation algorithm as a more efficient way to compute all gradients. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Backpropagation Explained for Beginners \(Part 2\): There Has to Be a Better Way](https://daily.dev/posts/backpropagation-explained-for-beginners-part-2-there-has-to-be-a-better-way-nh7wdzpsa) · Towards Data Science · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Backpropagation Explained for Beginners \(Part 3\): How Backpropagation Really Works](https://daily.dev/posts/backpropagation-explained-for-beginners-part-3-how-backpropagation-really-works-epjfnxkab) · Towards Data Science · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Backpropagation: How a Neural Network Learns From Its Mistakes](https://daily.dev/posts/backpropagation-how-a-neural-network-learns-from-its-mistakes-byraqzxku) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Neural Networks Explained: What They Are and How to Build One in Python](https://daily.dev/posts/neural-networks-explained-what-they-are-and-how-to-build-one-in-python-4lpifrsbi) · freeCodeCamp · 3 upvotes · 0 comments - [What's Backpropagation? - Mathematical Intuition](https://daily.dev/posts/what-s-backpropagation---mathematical-intuition-ouevmwllv) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#deep-learning](https://daily.dev/tags/deep-learning), [#neural-networks](https://daily.dev/tags/neural-networks), [#gradient-descent](https://daily.dev/tags/gradient-descent) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/backpropagation-explained-for-beginners-part-1-building-the-intuition-219g21wnz) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Backpropagation Explained for Beginners (Part 1): Building the Intuition","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/backpropagation-explained-for-beginners-part-1-building-the-intuition-219g21wnz","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/backpropagation-explained-for-beginners-part-1-building-the-intuition-219g21wnz"},"datePublished":"2026-07-19T17:30:09.349Z","dateModified":"2026-09-14T06:13:06.263Z","description":"A beginner-friendly introduction to backpropagation in neural networks, building intuition from first principles. 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