From a brief examination (my university has a subscription to Safari Books--one of my favorite parts of being a college student), this book seems like it lacks direction.
As much as it's useful to read a detailed account of what Chuck Moore was thinking when he created Forth, or chuckle as Tom Love takes pot shots at Bjarne Stroustrup [1], I really don't see a cohesive message across the whole work. Obviously, this won't be a problem for many people, but really, as many of these stories are already all over the web, I'm not sure how much original value this work is providing.
[1]Tom Love (co-creator of Objective-C): There's the successful direction, and then there's the approach that Bjarne took with C++. In one case, it was a small, simple—dare I say, elegant—programming language that was very crisp and well defined. In the other case it was a pretty ugly, complicated, difficult language that had some really troublesome features. I think those are the distinctions between the two.
The issues addressed in the table of contents appeal to me; but I expect you're right, that there would only be cohesiveness within each section, not between them.
BTW: I've heard good things about Objective-C. Any idea why it was not successful outside Apple? Was it because of Apple's proprietary approach?
As far as I can tell (as an amateur mac developer), the major advantage Objective-C has on the mac over other platforms is the extensive support that Cocoa [1], Apple's giant grouping of APIs/Frameworks/etc, lends. It's so helpful, in fact, that many Mac developers refer to programming in Objective-C as "Cocoa Programming" (also, it's the title of the best programming book I've ever read [2]).
Sounds like it's branded/positioned as "Cocoa"... and possibly support is lacking on other platforms (I guess you mean libraries - they're crucial for language success).
As much as it's useful to read a detailed account of what Chuck Moore was thinking when he created Forth, or chuckle as Tom Love takes pot shots at Bjarne Stroustrup [1], I really don't see a cohesive message across the whole work. Obviously, this won't be a problem for many people, but really, as many of these stories are already all over the web, I'm not sure how much original value this work is providing.
[1]Tom Love (co-creator of Objective-C): There's the successful direction, and then there's the approach that Bjarne took with C++. In one case, it was a small, simple—dare I say, elegant—programming language that was very crisp and well defined. In the other case it was a pretty ugly, complicated, difficult language that had some really troublesome features. I think those are the distinctions between the two.