Sparse Autoencoders, Andrew Ng and Stanford Machine Learning Group, 2011 (Stanford University) - Introduces and explains sparse autoencoders, covering both L1 and KL divergence methods for enforcing sparsity, with practical examples.
Deep Learning, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville, 2016 (MIT Press) - Offers a detailed theoretical background on autoencoders and various regularization strategies, including sparsity, within the broader deep learning context.