Customer Review for this product :
I couldn't connect with it - I really wanted to like this book. I enjoy learning new languages and found the author's style pretty engaging.
My experience started off well. I felt that I learned some new stuff about Ruby (I've used Ruby on and off for seven years, and read a couple of books on it -- so that was a good sign).
After that I hit a real speed bump, IO left me cold and I found that the Prolog chapter, although it made me understand how to code Prolog better that when I looked at it decades ago, didn't help me internalize why I would want to.
I decided to put the book aside for a bit and switch to Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!: A Beginner's Guide. After getting about halfway through that, I wanted some more hands on work so I looked over the Haskell chapter in Seven Languages and found that it really wouldn't help me with what I was trying to understand (the type system).
The bottom line is that despite the author's good intentions and solid work there is no substitute for a deeper dive into each language. I give it two stars because of the Ruby chapter and the value of the interviews with the language designers.
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More Detailed Product Description
Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell. With Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, by Bruce A. Tate, you'll go beyond the syntax-and beyond the 20-minute tutorial you'll find someplace online. This book has an audacious goal: to present a meaningful exploration of seven languages within a single book. Rather than serve as a complete reference or installation guide, Seven Languages hits what's essential and unique about each language. Moreover, this approach will help teach you how to grok new languages.
For each language, you'll solve a nontrivial problem, using techniques that show off the language's most important features. As the book proceeds, you'll discover the strengths and weaknesses of the languages, while dissecting the process of learning languages quickly--for example, finding the typing and programming models, decision structures, and how you interact with them.
Among this group of seven, you'll explore the most critical programming models of our time. Learn the dynamic typing that makes Ruby, Python, and Perl so flexible and compelling. Understand the underlying prototype system that's at the heart of JavaScript. See how pattern matching in Prolog shaped the development of Scala and Erlang. Discover how pure functional programming in Haskell is different from the Lisp family of languages, including Clojure.
Explore the concurrency techniques that are quickly becoming the backbone of a new generation of Internet applications. Find out how to use Erlang's let-it-crash philosophy for building fault-tolerant systems. Understand the actor model that drives concurrency design in Io and Scala. Learn how Clojure uses versioning to solve some of the most difficult concurrency problems.
It's all here, all in one place. Use the concepts from one language to find creative solutions in another-or discover a language that may become one of your favorites.
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