This weekend I have been working through the published version of this book.
The ideas are great, but there are too many errors in the examples to make it easy to work through.
The book builds up a framework for using Genetic Algorithms, including some sophisticated logging, visualisation and performance tuning tricks. Some of the example code used clearly belongs with earlier drafts. I am sure if you download the sample code you could fix the mistakes. For example some of the logic in the tiger example is wrong in the first instance, but correct when used later on. Also I don’t think that you can pass an anonymous function to apply.
Here is the repo that I have been working on:
https://github.com/chriseyre2000/genetic
Developer Rants 