Deep Learning, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville, 2016 (MIT Press) - This book serves as a comprehensive reference for deep learning, with Chapter 6 specifically addressing feedforward deep networks and their layer structure, including input, hidden, and output layers, and activation functions.
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Christopher M. Bishop, 2006 (Springer) - This foundational text provides a strong mathematical basis for neural networks, covering multi-layer perceptrons, their architecture, and the role of different layers in detail.