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Hal uses this as the textbook for his undergrad machine learning course. Having recently taken that course (in the spring 2013 semester), I feel justified sayin
by tedks 13y ago
Hal uses this as the textbook for his undergrad machine learning course. Having recently taken that course (in the spring 2013 semester), I feel justified saying that this book needs a lot of work before it's usable as a textbook or even a learning tool. Most of the time this text served primarily as an initial "dereference" of ideas yielding not concrete information, but a series of other pointers that I'd need to chase on Google before getting anything usable.
He clearly has high hopes for CIML, based on all the infoboxes and chapters that are still incomplete; it's a shame he'll likely need to get tenure before finishing it.
(This should in no way be taken as a slight on Hal's teaching; his class was the best sort of challenging in that it required a large amount of work, and yielded a correspondingly large amount of insight. He's also a fantastic lecturer and a fair grader.)
- ninjin 13y ago> "... it's a shame he'll likely need to get tenure before finishing it." Judging by his homepage [1] he is at least on the tenure track. Unless the notion of an Assistant Professor is different over in the states. I agree about the sentiment about the book, at least the chapter on Neural Networks needs some serious work (I believe there are errors in there, maybe I should mail Hal). As a person and researcher I only have good things to say about him, do check out it his blog if you are into ML and NLP [2] and let's hope he will find the time to continue polishing on this freely available book (I do like his writing). [1]: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~hal/ http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~hal/ [2]: http://nlpers.blogspot.com/ http://nlpers.blogspot.com/