A good, albeit highly idiosyncratic, guide to Statistical Learning. The highly personal account of the theory is both the strong point and the drawback of the treatise. On one side, Vapnick never loses sight of the big picture, and gives illuminating insights and formulations of the "basic problems" (as he calls them), that are not found in any other book. The lack of proofs and the slightly erratic organization of the topic make for a brisk, enjoyable reading. On the minus side, the choice of the topics is very biased. In this respect, the book is a self-congratulatory tribute by the author to himself: it appears that the foundations of statistical learning were single-handedly laid by him and his collaborators. This is not really the case. Consistency of the Empircal Risk Measure is rather trivial from the viewpoint of a personal trained in asymptotic statistics, and interval estimators for finite data sets are the subject of much advanced statistical literature. Finally, SVMs and neural nets are just a part of the story, and probably not the most interesting.
In a nutshell, what Vapnick shows, he shows very well, and is able to provide the "why" of things as no one else. What he doesn't show... you'll have to find somewhere else (the recent Book of Friedman Hastie & Tibs is an excellent starting point).
A last remark. The book is rich in grammatical errors and typos. They could have been corrected in the second edition, but do not detract from the book's readability.
