My criticism with fast.ai, (I am part time educator), is that this approach is an information overload and poor sequencing. Their comparison with Teach whole game approach is flawed because a game of, say Football, is essentially simple. So you can say just start kicking around. But we don't teach chess this way. It is accepted that you have to spend some time upfront to learn the rules before you can play even simple game. Sure one need not learn castling or en-passant upfront. But you get the drift.
This book (looking at the preview chapters) is going to follow the lego blocks approach or bottoms up approach to build it. For me, this is correct way to teach supervised ML focussed on neural networks and deep learning. We have a problem of too many library plumbers in the ML field currently. People who can piece together library function calls without knowing why it is working. But this house of cards is not sustainable strategy to build AI based application over long term.
Long story short, the book will need patience but that patience will be worth it!