Anyone can write a book but to have the creator of a language write the book himself offers several benefits namely that the author has a much deeper knowledge of the language than most others could offer

Where the book really shines is that while it is thicker book the author prefers to reiterate his point than to make you leaf back through the book to find where he last talked about something letting you continue on in the book instead of flipping back and forth looking up terms

The book covers beginning level programming all the way to high level gui and algorithms issues towards the end