You make a good point; it does spend a lot of time on the front-end. As pointed out elsewhere, Muchnick is more thorough on back-end topics, which it appears we both agree are far more interesting. I've definitely heard of those other books before, and in particular, Appel's _Compiling with Continuations_ will be especially interesting when I look into compiling functional languages.

Actually, I don't have any personal experience with the Stanford course. I am reading the book for fun really. (For all its faults, it is quite engrossing!) I just thought it would be relevant to investigate under what context this book is generally used.