You are the target audience of this book. The Wolfram Language has gotten huge, making it harder for beginners to find their way around the basics via reference docs.<p>That said, WL is in fact based on pretty simple primitives. If you are familiar with functional programming, things like NestList are familiar and you&#x27;ll start learning by finding the analogues of your favorite FP constructs.<p>WL also has a lot of functions that you might call &quot;optional&quot;: those that could be restated as simple combinations of other functions. The rationale there is pretty simple: if there is a well-defined, commonly used chunk of computation, it should be given a name (and design). The fact that a fair amount of work is put into both the name and design of these things gives a higher sense of coherence (and predictability) than you might expect from their number.