Is the recommended courses page on MIRI's website up to date with regards to what textbooks they recommend for each topic? Should I be taking the recommendations fairly seriously, or more with a grain of salt? I know the original author is no longer working at MIRI, so I'm feeling a bit unsure.

I think Understanding Machine Learning (out this year) is better than Bishop's book (which is, frankly, insufferably obscurantist), and that instead of model-checking you ought to be learning a proof assistant (I learned Coq from Benjamin Pierce's Software Foundations).