The book is well-organized. One criticism I have is that, for an “Introduction,” its heavy use of mathematical notation (versus prose) can be daunting, especially if one hasn’t been immersed in that sort of thing for a while. Had the instructor not been so awesome, supplementing the material with demos, real-world examples, and other materials (like Andrew Moore’s Support Vector Machine slides), I might have been less motivated to power through.

Going forward, the book will be a good reference.