Deep Learning, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville, 2016 (MIT Press) - This book offers extensive coverage of deep learning fundamentals, including detailed explanations of autoencoder architectures, encoder functionality, latent representations, and neural network components.
Reducing the Dimensionality of Data with Neural Networks, Geoffrey E. Hinton, Ruslan R. Salakhutdinov, 2006Science, Vol. 313 (American Association for the Advancement of Science)DOI: 10.1126/science.1127647 - A paper that showed deep autoencoders are effective for nonlinear dimensionality reduction and learning data features, directly relevant to the encoder's role in data compression.