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A review by hlame
Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks: Languages That Are Shaping the Future by Bruce Tate, Frederic Daoud, Ian Dees
It's a frustrating book that I'm not sure I would recommend to anyone. If you are interested in any of the languages covered you'd do better looking for tutorials and blog posts and videos online as this book won't give you enough of what you want.
A major frustration, that the authors can't really be blamed for, is that having been written in 2014 using languages that were still early in development much of the content is now mildly broken or completely irrelevant for a reader in 2018. The Elm chapter in particular focuses on a feature removed from the current version making the chapter almost entirely useless.
The authors say in the introduction that there won't be much time for each language and you'll have to do a lot of work for yourself to get the most out of each chapter. Even with that caveat I still feel like they could have done a better job of explaining what they wanted us to get out of these languages. The final chapter, "Wrapping up", does an ok job of this, but it would have been better to have this mixed into the chapter for each language rather than at the end where it's too late for a frustrated reader.
One good thing however is that many chapters include interviews with the language creators exploring why they created the languages, or their favourite features. A full book of these would be excellent, but that's not what we have here.
A major frustration, that the authors can't really be blamed for, is that having been written in 2014 using languages that were still early in development much of the content is now mildly broken or completely irrelevant for a reader in 2018. The Elm chapter in particular focuses on a feature removed from the current version making the chapter almost entirely useless.
The authors say in the introduction that there won't be much time for each language and you'll have to do a lot of work for yourself to get the most out of each chapter. Even with that caveat I still feel like they could have done a better job of explaining what they wanted us to get out of these languages. The final chapter, "Wrapping up", does an ok job of this, but it would have been better to have this mixed into the chapter for each language rather than at the end where it's too late for a frustrated reader.
One good thing however is that many chapters include interviews with the language creators exploring why they created the languages, or their favourite features. A full book of these would be excellent, but that's not what we have here.