Jurafsky and Martin's long-awaited text sets a new gold standard that will be difficult to surpass, as attested by the flurry of glowing reviews that accompanied its publication early this year. 1 In a nutshell, J&M have successfully integrated knowledge-based and statistical methods with linguistic foundations and computational models in a book that is at once balanced, comprehensive, and, above all, eminently readable. My review will focus primarily on the format and content of Speech and Language Processing (SLP) as well as its use in a course.