I've taken the MOOC version of this course and it was very poorly explained. I hope the content and lecturing has changed since 2013 because the content itself is really interesting.

I wasn't impressed with the quality of the book as well. I did learn quite a few methods there (minhash) that I got to use later so thanks for that, but compared to MLPR, Learning from Data, or TESL books the quality of the former pales.