I would even go further and say I did not find the intro book a good book at all. The text was full of non-trivial errors that genuinely hindered students' und

I would even go further and say I did not find the intro book a good book at all. The text was full of non-trivial errors that genuinely hindered students' understanding. Moreover, the presentation was not particularly enlightening -- lengthy mathematical discussions therein were not neither rigorous enough for a proper mathematical introduction; nor distilled enough for an application practitioners. I understand that Murphy explicitly tried to strike a balance -- I wonder if this balance ended up being in the awkward no man's land. I do agree that I found the book better as a secondary reference due to its breadth of topics. The second book seems to continue this trend of covering even more topics.