Fine job of showing off features of the Wolfram language. Many of which incidentally require an active internet connection to access the Wolfram Cloud and potentially require an additional logging in for the really neat-o ones, go figure. If I hadn't had previous functional programming experience, I would have been completely lost, because the Wolfram syntax contains some of the ugliest line noise this side of legacy Perl. At times the exposition is overly terse in an effort to show how very simple everything is. The decision to delay introducing how to write a function until chapter 40 is a bit odd, but the philosophy of the book is to use one of the scores of existing library functions. Which would be fine if I didn't get the feeling it was all part of an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy for creating a legion of programmers dependent upon the Wolfram Computational Engine, which will, of course eventually be merged with Stephen Wolfram, the person, to create Wolfram the Computeror. ( )

A good introductory overview to the Wolfram Language. Answers to some exercises contain errors that could be frustrating for readers who have no background in programming, mathematics, or computer science. Later chapters could use more explanation of syntax (especially the sections on patterns and datasets), and a broader selection of examples. ( )