My Review of Seven Languages, Seven Weeks, the beginning

Last time I blogged about Seven Languages, Seven Weeks, the beginning, I was thrilled at how much you folks liked the book - which I got week before it went on sale on Amazon. I like to pre-order books especially when I know they will be classics like The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Collector's Edition. Since then it has been on my shelf gathering dust until now. Although I attempted to read it immediately I received it, I didn't really spend as much time as I wanted on it because work, other books and family commitments got in the way.

If you didn't know about Seven Languages, Seven Weeks, the beginning, it is written by Bruce Tate of Pragmatic Programmer fame - he's also the author of many other books highly regarded books including Better, Faster, Lighter Java.

This book covers seven languages over seven weeks (which is a big challenge) - breaking them into very manageable size for you to cover each of the languages in one week. What I love about this book is that it covers some of the latest top languages (Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby). For those who already know other languages like Java, Python and C++, you will definitely enjoy reading this book. Once you've finished and attempted all the problems accompaning each of the languages, you will be ready to use them in anger.

Like I said in the initial blog post, I'm very happy that Python or Java was not used in this book - you don't want to be relearning the language you already use; so the use of these new languages is a wise move. It has been in my todo list to learn new languages, so when this book came on the radar, I could not contain my excitement. If you are a serious developer you will benefit immensely from this book as it will allow you to expand your programming knowledge and add these languages to your toolbox.

If like me you love programming languages, then you will love this book.