Sometimes I with that intro to compilers books placed a bigger emphasis on recursive descent. Recursive descent works anywhere, without dependencies to external tools such as Bison or ANTLR. I hope that this book marks the start of a trend.
Sure, everyone should learn about LR parsers at some point. But I'd argue that outside a compiler class, knowing recursive descent is likely to be useful more often than knowing LR parsing.
Recursive descent parsing and a hand-rolled lexer teaches grammars and general language design way better than other alternatives.