The criticism there doesn't seem to jibe with the table of contents, which is quite similar to Russell & Norvig's which he recommends instead. (I'm a fan of Russell & Norvig, and have only skimmed a chapter or two of this other book; but it looks like reasonably good competition.)
I have a chip on my shoulder for people using the term "artificial intelligence" to refer to combinatorial heuristic search problems rather than to computational agents based on statistical learning. The thing being, combinatorial heuristic search problems and first-order logic proof systems tend to solve very few real-world problems badly.
Yeah I'm no expert so I can't really comment on which book is better. But as someone who knows nothing about AI I'm finding this book pretty fascinating. Seems like a fairly gentle introduction to me.
And I definitely appreciate that it's freely available online.
