If looked upon as a reference, this book isn't all that bad. There are some interesting concepts here. Few, thought--most of the stuff is self evident. Also, I really think them using Scheme was a big mistake. A book of this caliber should not concern itself with specific languages, true, and they could have done two things: use a syntactically simple language, or ignore any specific language all together and use pseudocode. They chose the former, and that's too bad. Scheme is totally inappropriate for these kinds of complicated things. My other gripe with the title is that it doesn't go in depth into any one topic. Just a bunch of concepts thrown at you and briefly explained. The book migh serve well as a reference, but it definitely isn't for beginners, as it claims to be, and it definitely won't teach you programming. Most of the material here is curious, but hardly relevant to you if you've never programmed before.