You are correct. Like I mentioned in this comment stream, I also took his class. This was 5 years ago. I have to say that I learned a ridiculous amount of low level systems stuff from his classes, and very much enjoyed his classroom presentation - I completely agreed with his view that a professor is there to present his expert opinion on the topic that may very well be different or tangential with the curriculum that gets covered by you doing the reading.
I was more attracted to project based courses when I was there in graduate school. Other professors that I liked very much, one is Ken Perlin and another is Denis Zorin. It was the real learning experience to build graphic stuffs from scratch.
I didn't take Dennis Shasha's class. But his heuristic learning and distributed computing are also project based.
