Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: not a beginner's book

This book is probably great if you are already an expert. Topics are presented very briefly with poor examples. Only a very small number of the questions have solutions, none of which are in the book. They are only available on the author's web site and some of them are wrong. The author really doesn't present his algorithms in a stepwise bulleted manner, even though most of them are well suited to that type of display. He chooses instead to bury algorithms in blocks of text, which makes it very difficult to use this book as a reference for assignments. His terminology is also very unclear. Unless you are already an expert, you will find yourself rereading sections four and five times before realizing that they are just plain inscrutable without some large body of prior knowledge. If you have a deep appreciation for obfuscation, or did your Phd work on databases, you'll probably love this book.