Bruce Tate

An excellent survey course on a variety of programming languages and concepts. Don't expect to become more than conversant with the ideas in a particular language after reading about it here, though- three days a pop doesn't get you the ability to Get Stuff Done. Instead, you'll get the most out of this book if you treat it one or both of two ways:

1) A buffet of samples: try a bit of each language and see if any intrigue you enough to dive in further. I bought a copy of rel="nofollow" target="_top">Clojure Programming after reading the Clojure chapter.
2) Mind-expansion: focus on the new ideas introduced by the languages rather than the languages themselves- what problems are solved by pattern matching, immutable state, actors, etc? I'd particularly recommend this if you're a professional who's only worked with one or two languages in anger, particularly Java or C# type languages.… (mais)

Instead of seven weeks, it took me about two years. I would read a chapter on one language and do the exercises, then get distracted by other things and not come back to it for several months. I finally forced myself to run through the final three languages during my Christmas vacation since I was sick and didn't want to leave the house.

Overall, this is an excellent book that will expose you to different ways of thinking as a programmer. I enjoyed all seven languages and I plan to dive deeper with a couple of them (Erlang and Clojure). Tate does a good job of balancing breadth and depth with each language and really gets to the core of what makes each language unique, and points out the strengths and weaknesses of each. My one complaint is with the final section of the final language in which he covers "monads" in the Haskell language. He points out at the beginning of that section that he dreaded writing about such a difficult concept, and unfortunately, I don't think he succeeded in explaining it very well. But that remains the only flaw in this book in my opinion. I think it is well worth the time of any serious programmer to read through this book, whether it takes seven weeks or seven years.… (mais)