Making the Most of This Book

The first few chapters of this book lay the conceptual foundation you'll need for most everything else we cover, and chapters generally build on material that has come before. That said, feel free to skip ahead for any reasonwe've tried to make that possible by providing cross-references when we use terms introduced earlier on.

Chapter 10, Domain-Specific Embedded Languages, is an exception to the rule that later chapters depend on earlier ones. It focuses mostly on concepts, and only appears late in the book because at that point you'll have learned the tools and techniques to put Domain-Specific Embedded Languages into play in real code. If you only remember one chapter by the time you're done, make it that one.

Near the end of many chapters, you'll find a Details section that summarizes key ideas. These sections usually add new material that deepens the earlier discussion,^[1] so even if you are inclined to skim them the first time through, we suggest you refer back to them later.

^[1] We borrowed this idea from Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo's Accelerated C++: Practical Programming By Example [KM00].

We conclude most chapters with exercises designed to help you develop both your programming and conceptual muscles. Those marked with asterisks are expected to be more of a workout than the others. Not all exercises involve writing codesome could be considered "essay questions"and you don't have to complete them in order to move on to later chapters. We do suggest you look through them, give a little thought to how you'd answer each one, and try your hand at one or two; it's a great way to gain confidence with what you've just read.