Full disclosure -- I've known Robert Hecht-Nielsen since 1986, when I took his short course on neural networks at UCSD. He's a respected friend and colleague.
Robert's passion for the field and his research has resulted in an enthusiastic presentation style that apparently struck one of the other reviewers as "over the top". But the plus side is that this is a contagious passion. This is particularly true given his outstanding results, particularly in sentence completion, next sentence generation, and object segmentation. He is a talented researcher with substantial neuroengineering and design experience, plus a broad and deep knowledge of the field, as well as a strong research team, so these advantages have to be taken into consideration when evaluating his results. That said, the results speak for themselves and make this book a worthwhile read.
