In my opinion the book is horrible. It doesn’t provide any in depth details. It functions as a high level survey of the field. It is very superficial and just scratches the surface. It doesn’t describe the presented algorithms in any detail. It’s a very poor version of Daphne Kollers amazing book on graphical models.
These broad survey type classes were the most useful ones in university for me. It's not like I would remember the specifics after the class anyway, but when I run into a problem I now have a huge bag of potential solutions. When I need details, there are often scientific papers or technical reports going in-depth on each of these things.
