I was hoping the author would write about H.264 specifically, for instance, how it was basically the "dumping ground" of all the little tweaks and improvements that were pulled out of MPEG-4 for one reason or another (usually because they were too computationally expensive), and why, as a result, it has thousands of different combinations of features that are extremely complicated to support, which is why it had to be grouped into "profiles" (e.g., Baseline, Main, High): http://blog.mediacoderhq.com/h264-profiles-and-levels/

I was also hoping that he would at least touch on the features that make H.264 unique from previous MPEG standards, like in-loop deblocking, CABAC Entropy Coding, etc..

Again, it's fine as an introduction to video encoding, but there's nothing in here specific to H.264.