Seven Languages in Seven Weeks..

I keep meaning to start some kind of coding again; I’m not really sure but I think I should. I’ve not donated to an open-source project in years and I feel a little guilty. Still I’m not really that great a coder, I like to dive in and out. So I came across Seven Languages in Seven Weeks and it seems the ideal book for a dilettante like myself.

Published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf, it aims to give you an taste of

• Ruby
• Io
• Prolog
• Scala
• Erlang
• Clojure
• Haskell

By necessity, each section is fairly brief and actually split into three days; so you could do Seven languages in Three Weeks if you wanted.

So far, I’ve got through the three days of Ruby and I must say that it does give you just enough of a taste of language for you to start to write simple code and might even be able to achieve something useful.

The end of chapter exercises are a mix of practical programming exercises but also getting to do your own research. For example, the book tells you where to get the languages from but it does not waste paper telling you how to install them. You are expected to be competent enough to figure this out for yourself.

I would say that if you already have some coding experience and are willing to use Google; you will enjoy this. It’s not a programming primer and it is not going to turn you into an expert in any of the languages but it’s enough to get you started.

Worth a look….