Rating 3/5

Some interesting articles in this book (it’s really more a collection of articles than a book) but they’re all over the place. I guess this is to be expected with so many authors contributing, but I don’t think it made for a great read. Also, I stumbled on quite a few typos and grammatical errors throughout the book.

For me the most interesting parts were about Swift, because this is a very popular language I knew very little about in advance. I now feel that I have a lot more insight about the good and bad parts of it. And the functional perspective on it was exactly what I wanted.

I’ve never liked Scala and I still don’t, so the book didn’t really affect my opinion there. I was just reminded about many of the reasons I don’t like it.

I did enjoy some of the Haskell material. Mostly because it was about the value of having a good type system rather than about the language itself.

In conclusion, I found this to be a decent book, but I wouldn’t recommend it over a carefully selected list of blog posts about the languages covered.