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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.
About the Author
Bruce Tate runs RapidRed, an Austin, TX-based practice that consults on lightweight development in Ruby. Previously he worked at IBM in roles ranging from a database systems programmer to Java consultant. He left IBM to work for several startups in roles ranging from Client Solutions Director to CTO. He speaks internationally and is the author of more than ten books, including From Java to Ruby, Deploying Rails Applications, the best-selling Bitter series, Beyond Java, and the Jolt-winning Better, Faster, Lighter Java.
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Customer Reviews
Firstly, I would take the "Seven weeks" with a pinch of salt: this isn't really a "learn Mython in 21 days" type book - with little lessons that lead at the end to being able to program in Mython. If you want to learn, say, Haskell, there are better books for that available from this very web site. And therefore you certainly won't be an expert in SEVEN languages when you've worked through this book either (i deliberately say "work through" as this is a very hands-on book).
So without out the way, I'll say what the book is and why i love it so much.
This is a book that is good if you want to more than dip your toes into a language - as Mr Tate says "I won't make you an expert, but I'll teach you more than 'Hello World' ". The amount of effort put into this tome seems phenomenal: ("This is the most demanding book I have ever written."). Not satisfied with teaching you loads about the languages (and some of these were not the author's area of expertise, he had to learn the languages himself!) he somehow found time to look into the history of the languages (an interesting subject in itself) and ALSO interview many of the key people involved in creating the languages!. The "why did you make this language" interviews are fascinating reading.
I also love Mr Tate's style- it's quite 'light' (but not as light as the "Head First" style)- you don't feel like you're reading a textbook at all, and despite the fact that some of it can get very technical, this book never feels like heavy reading: part of it is due to the fact that he has a tv/movie theme running through each language: for Ruby, the theme is Mary Poppins, and for Erlang it's The Matrix- he uses these themes to highlight the different characters of the languages, and I've never seen it done anywhere else (not to this extent anyway) but it does work, and I found the connections really amusing.
"So it's a pleasant to read, deeply researched book, but what about the languages?", I hear you ask.
Okay, in the 309 jam-packed pages Mr Tate will introduce you to, and see you through a converstion with:
Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, and Haskell.
It's a fairly steep learning curve: this is NOT a "how to program" or "how to install" software book; but it does get you doing some fairly intense stuff fairly quickly - even if you don't do all the examples you come away knowing enough about each language to know if you want to explore it further.
Also, even if like me you're aware of some of the languages (i already knew about Haskell and Prolog) and don't want to read those parts, there's so much about the other languages, that it's still worth the money, but I would say that: it's after using this book I am now in love with Ruby, Clojure and Scala - otherwise I might not have come across those for ages - so of course I am biased: this book quite literally changed my coding life!
So to summarise: if you're interested in programming languages per se, rather than just programming in general, and getting bored with Java/C and want more than a superficial look at some other fascinating languages out there then this is an excellent book to start your coding adventure.
Alan
However, this book is one of my favourite ! really neat approach.
The examples that leads up to the exercises are interesting and I frequently find myself spending more time playing around with those than doing the exercises. Thats not saying that the exercises are not challenging - they are...
Great stuff, and when I get through this, I am set for the next seven years by which time I hope there is a sequel ;)
I had looked into a couple of the presented languages before, but the introduction in this book gave me quite a new... Read more
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