Coding Sky

To record my daily development life, I started this blog called “Coding Sky“. I will share some of my interesting experiences regarding to programming and my real life.

In this starting post, I want to recommend a new book I bought from Pragmatic two days ago, which is called  ”Seven Languages in Seven Weeks“.  Currently this book is still in Beta version, but you can buy an e-version of it and follow the author’s progress. From the title, it is easy to know that the author tries to teach us seven languages in seven weeks, and these seven languages are Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure and Haskell which covers four programming paradigms. At beginning, I thought the author is too ambitious and gives the reader an impossible mission, but after reading the Ruby part, I found this book excellent and became confident in myself. This book is very readable, understandable and in a tutorial style, which means I could verify and practice what I have learnt immediately when I am reading this book. But different from the tutorials on the Internet, the tutorials in this book teach you more because the author tries to tell you WHY and some essential concepts or ideas behind the language. Interestingly, the author often uses some impressive analogies to help the reader understand, such as the spoonful of sugar taken by the British nanny Mary Poppins. Please note, this book doesn’t cover everything of a language, instead, it only covers essential parts. But don’t worry, the author points us a direction to find out. And I don’t believe you are looking for a boring reference book. In addition, the author provides several challenging programming work after each day study to push the reader master the language. You have to read the book carefully and find out a lot of things yourself to complete the work. It won’t be easy.

It should be noted that this book seems to be unsuitable for a freshman. If you have programming experiences previously and want to learn some new languages, this book is ready for you. I believe I won’t become an expert on these seven languages after reading this book. But if I know the essence of these languages and can quickly learn and master them when necessary, that’s enough.