May I recommend our book (co-author Daniel P. Friedman): The Little Learner: A straight line to deep learning, which was written for the exact same reason you mention: To get past the barrier of mathematics and provide the intuition behind it. Hopefully it will open up some of that black box. Here's a medium article I wrote about it: https://medium.com/@mendhekar/fundé-clear-ai-and-the-joys-of-learning-from-first-principles-26dc2b573550