Instruct: Classify a given review as either positive or negative.
Query: Very poor explanations

I dont think the other reviewers are quite accurate in their assessment of this text. The book does offer many examples, and the pseudocode is very helpful in implementing these methods. The real problem with this book is that many of the explanations of the methods are written in pseudocode. This makes learning the concepts extremely confusing and difficult, as they are written in code. The proofs are helpful, but with the confusing notation in iterative methods, there is no way near enough information to correctly learn what is going on. I took this class in graduate school and never used the book unless I wanted to see some code. My advice: Take notes from the professor, and if you need to code up a method, go to the library and copy down what you need. A VERY poor teaching aid!