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Comment by junkbit | Hacker News Reader

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junkbit·

There's a great book called Seven Languages in Seven Weeks that teaches this way of thinking to broaden your horizons.

The languages discussed are Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, and Haskell

http://pragprog.com/titles/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-w...

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I am not sure how great it is. My impression was it skips and jumps around the language territory. For example, as I looked through the Clojure chapter, I knew I would not understand the language if I had not had studied it before.

I found the book very useful. The idea isn't to give you a deep understanding of the language, it's more along the lines of: introduce some cool concepts that you may not have seen before, and encourage you to do your own thing to learn the language. It also gives a quick introduction with examples to several different programming paradigms that many are unfamiliar with. The Haskell part is not particularly deep either, but it gives you some basics and gets you started.

I really loved the book, but I do think the title is misleading - for me, it was really "familiarize yourself with the concepts of seven languages in two or three weeks". It's clearly a marketing title, which is a bit off-putting, but a great introduction to the included languages.

I am actually using this book right now as the textbook for my programming languages course, so far it has been fun but I tend to like the pragprog books.

It is a pretty great book. It moves fast and does require some extra study but it's well worth it. I like learning things on my own and the daily "homework" is great.

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