That book taught me an important lesson that I wish I'd learned earlier, that for many of my courses reading the textbook would have been a good idea. My lecturer for the ML course was unbelievably tedious, and I realised I'd absorbed almost nothing. I sat down with Mitchell's book for a week before the exam, did all the exercises, and got the highest mark in my degree.
I often wonder how much better I could have done, and how much more I'd have learnt, if I'd put that sort of work into all my other modules earlier in the course.
> This course did not exist until 2003, when Professor Ng taught it for the first time with 68 students, and very little like it existed anywhere on college campuses 15 years ago.
I took a Machine Learning course as part of my degree in 2001/2. About half of my year in the department attended. The course had been running for many years and I understood it to be a standard fixture in CS department curricula across the UK at the time.
Machine Learning was a standard offering in CS departments in the early 2000's. It was already a venerable subfield with much of the basic theory having been developed in the 1970's and 1980's. I remember thinking it was something of a curiosity and not terribly practical but it's absurd to imply it sprung from nothing.