But this book really teaches nothing about programming like Maeder's old book does. I guess it was my fault - the title suggested something quite different to what it is to me.

This book will, if you read it carefully, teach you a lot of Mathematica. But starts with exactly the same example as Steven Wolfram's The Mathematica Book (the standard reference).

In[1]:= 1+1
Out[1]= 2

Much of the book is just the same sort of thing you find in the standard book (and is online at Wolfram Research's web site and is built into the help browser). I did not really want this book to be told how to take the sine of Pi/8 or other such material that is covered in The Mathematica Book.

This book is part of a 4-volume set. I only have this part and I somewhat doubt I'll buy any more. The book is quite heavy, but is significantly more manageable than Wolfram's book, which really is a pain because of its sheer size.

One thing I found odd about this book was the references. The preface has 59 references. Chapter 1 has 1194 references! Nobody could accuse the author of plagiarism! The book mentions that it took 20 years for astronomers to work out the tragectory of the moon, then cites about 10-15 journal references. Who would care? If I was an astronomer than perhaps I would, but I would not buy a book on Mathematica to learn about astronomy. I really was left puzzled what all the references achieved. It has more references than any book, review paper or PhD thesis I have ever seen. Removing 90% of them would make no difference to the value of the book, but would make it a bit lighter, which would nice.

The author is said to be a computer graphics expert. I can well believe this, as there are a lot of graphics in the book. Shame they are not in colour, as I expect some are quite nice. But not much us to me.

The book assumes an engineering/physical sciences background, so if you don't have that, you might soon be quite lost.