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A review by blairconrad
Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages by Bruce Tate
3.0
Disclaimer: I read the book, without doing the homework.
It's okay. A decent very low-level introduction to a few programming languages. As I was someone who was wondering "what's this 'Clojure' about" and so on, it met my basic need. I appreciate getting a taste of all the languages without all the hype - Tate went to pains to balance the good and the bad points of each language.
Unfortunately, the book was poorly made. The editing was lax, from the misspelling of "Leia" (a small thing, but distracting) to what appeared to be errors in syntax from one example to another (disastrous, if you're introducing someone to a language). I also found that Tate spent too much time on basic operations (I don't need to see a multi-page treatment of addition for _every_ language) and too little on some of the difficult concepts that set each language apart (e.g. monads).
So, for a _very_ quick survey of a language, not bad. But flawed.
It's okay. A decent very low-level introduction to a few programming languages. As I was someone who was wondering "what's this 'Clojure' about" and so on, it met my basic need. I appreciate getting a taste of all the languages without all the hype - Tate went to pains to balance the good and the bad points of each language.
Unfortunately, the book was poorly made. The editing was lax, from the misspelling of "Leia" (a small thing, but distracting) to what appeared to be errors in syntax from one example to another (disastrous, if you're introducing someone to a language). I also found that Tate spent too much time on basic operations (I don't need to see a multi-page treatment of addition for _every_ language) and too little on some of the difficult concepts that set each language apart (e.g. monads).
So, for a _very_ quick survey of a language, not bad. But flawed.