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Title: Grandiose but unsatisfying
Review: This is an elegantly designed yet arrogant and verbose volume. (As the reader is informed, writing the book took more than a hundred million keystrokes and more than "a hundred mouse miles.")So far, in reading it I have found three propositions: (1) The author, Wolfram, is a genius; (2) Simple programs can produce complex results; (3) Mathematica can be used to produce interesting patterns that have elements of repetition but are not symmetrical.The first of these propositions I leave to your own judgement (and that of history). The second is obviously true to any programmer. The third seems kind of trivial for the grandiose claims made.Speaking of grandiose claims, I keep trying to find the "new kind of science" promised in the introduction (and the hype). Maybe I need to study it further, but I just don't see anything justifying the claims here.
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