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Title: Yes it sucked!
Review: I too took the class with John Mitchell in Stanford a few years back. The manuscript, which now is this book, was very poorly written, erroneous, inconsitent and not even complete! It's one of the worst classes I've taken at Stanford. I believe I could've benefited more from the class had he put students' interest first by choosing a better textbook.I don't know why he put so much empathsis on ML. Had he put some decent effort in helping people actually understand ML, maybe it won't have been so frustrating (back then it was pre-2000, so there weren't many ML material available online - and you haven't heard of Google yet:-). For functional language, wouldn't Lisp be a better example for instructive purposes?Someone in the class at that time suggested him talk about scripting languages such as Perl (Python is now getting interesting). That would be useful comparison. But that was brushed aside.I would not buy this book unless you have no choice.
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