One of the things that can hook you into a new language is having a really well written introduction book that gives you the philosophy of the designers and the

One of the things that can hook you into a new language is having a really well written introduction book that gives you the philosophy of the designers and the big picture while moving through the syntax and semantics. The book is roughly 300 pages. Even with a careful reading that's only a few days invested. For instance I read Roberto Ierusalimschys's Programming in Lua and Niklaus Wirth's Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. But have never really had a project which fit either of those languages. I still enjoyed the books.