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Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages (Pragmatic Programmers) 1st Edition

4.4 out of 5 stars 56 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-1934356593
ISBN-10: 193435659X
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  • Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages (Pragmatic Programmers)
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Product Details

  • Series: Pragmatic Programmers
  • Paperback: 328 pages
  • Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf; 1 edition (November 20, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 193435659X
  • ISBN-13: 978-1934356593
  • Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 1.2 x 9.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #85,315 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

From the Publisher

Seven Languages in Seven Weeks Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks Seven Databases in Seven Weeks Seven Web Frameworks in Seven Weeks Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks Seven Mobile Apps in Seven Weeks
Seven Languages in Seven Weeks Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks Seven Databases in Seven Weeks Seven Web Frameworks in Seven Weeks Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks Seven Mobile Apps in Seven Weeks
Subtitle A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages Languages That Are Shaping the Future A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement Adventures in Better Web Apps When Threads Unravel Native Apps, Multiple Platforms
Content Coverage Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby Lua, Factor, Elixir, Elm, Julia, MiniKanren, and Idris Redis, Neo4J, CouchDB, MongoDB, HBase, Riak and Postgres Sinatra, CanJS, AngularJS, Ring, Webmachine, Yesod, and Immutant Threads & locks, functional programming, separating identity & state, actors, sequential processes, data parallelism, and the lambda architecture iOS, Android, Windows, RubyMotion, React Native, and Xamarin
Pages 328 pages 320 pages 354 pages 304 pages 300 pages 360 pages

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
Background: I stumbled across the author's blog post announcing his intention to write the book while looking for materials comparing language paradigms instead of particular languages (object-oriented, logical, functional, prototype, etc). The as yet unwritten book sounded like exactly what I was after (thus my enthusiastic anticipation). I purchased an electronic copy of this book from the Prag Press beta program about six months ago and began reading the chapters as they were completed and released. My paper copy just arrived from Amazon today. Thus I can comment on the whole content of the book and the physical object.

Languages: While the languages covered (Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell) are excitingly (painfully?) trendy the list is not without merit. In the introduction the author explains that he arrived at the list by asking readers and edited from there: swapping Io for JavaScript and excluding Python thereby making room for Prolog. One could debate the choice of Io over JavaScript (particularly in a post Node.js / Common.js world) and make a case for including Smalltalk as the canonical OO language over Ruby; however, the chosen languages each bring something to the book and represent a number of interesting paradigms.

Chapters: Each language has its own chapter. Each chapter has five sections:
- an introduction to the language covering topics like it's history, place in the modern language landscape, paradigm, etc
- 'Day 1'
- 'Day 2'
- 'Day 3'
- and a conclusion with a few parting words / 'the moral of the story is...'.
The boundaries between days are not particularly meaningful but roughly build from "here's the syntax" to "here's an interesting thing you can do with this paradigm".
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Format: Paperback
I was very disappointed in this book. I could have attain a similar level of depth with fewer unnecessary film-based analogies by reading each langauges' wikipedia page.

The author focuses heavily on syntax, program structure, and how common things are represented in each language, what the REPL, looks like in each case, etc. There many belabored explanations of well-understood language-agnostic concepts like prototypes, actors, futures, recursion, laziness, and immutability. Zero of these languages are interesting because of how lists work yet the book laboriously visits this example over and over. Similarly, only one or two of the languages has truly interesting things to say about concurrency, but he discusses concurrency over and over.

Each of these languages has made important contributions to the field of programming language design and culture. This is where the time should be spent--not developing a familiarity with basics like syntax and list operations. If I want to know what the code is going to look like visually, I can use wikipedia.

For instance, a core idea behind prolog is unification. The author gives lots of examples of prolog code, but fails to explain at any level of detail the theoretical basis for unification or how it works. I don't have a prolog background, and when I sat down to read the chapter, I hoped to come away with a basic working understanding of the concepts. All I ended up with is some ideas of how prolog is used and what it feels like at the surface of its syntax/semantics.

One of the most interesting things in Io is the combination of an unusually transparent message-passing discipline with a mutable syntax tree.
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Format: Paperback
The idea is good - have a brief overview of several programming languages that gather most curiosity in the community. The languages that made it to the book were chosen by the people the author asked beforehand.

Each language is given 3 days worth of chapters. First day is for a = b, second is for [a] = [b] and the third is for "real stuff". About two thirds of the book are therefore dedicated to simple variable assignments, number literals, containers (lists mostly), and control structures such as if's.

And herein lies the problem - although great to know that in language X assignment goes like

console> plz let a be 1
a nowz 1!!!oneone
console>

but what does it tell about the language ?

---QUOTE---
I'm confident that this material will capture the spirit of each programming language pretty well...
---/QUOTE---

I don't think it happened. It would be possible if the author had spent years working in each one. This is not the case, the author had learned the languages himself, took a bite and now explains the fullness and richness of taste. There is no trick here, the author is not pretending he is an expert in everything. All this is clearly admitted upfront. On the other hand a lot is required from the reader too. You are expected to give each individual language a try. Otherwise

---QUOTE---
If you simply read this book, you'll experience the flavour of the syntax and no more.
---/QUOTE---

Exactly what happened to me. None of the seven languages made me curious because of this book. I was curious about erlang before and I still am. I saw something beautiful behind haskell and I still do. The languages I haven't seen before, I'm as unsure about now as I was before.
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