The title suggests that the reader is already acquainted with handling the ingredients: the core programming language plus one of its five possible programming styles. Procedural programming, functional programming, rule-based programming, object-oriented programming, or recursive programming. When you then work on a larger program and get stuck because you forgot about the details of an implementional task, then reaching for a ready-to-use recipe from a cookbook should solve your task? Yes! Nice idea. The book offers hundreds of fine recipes, always in the typical Mathematica one-liner program format and all classified into easy-identifiable subject areas. So the problem is not finding out whether the book covers the implementional task or on which exact page to locate it. You will very quickly figure it out - the book is perfectly organized this way, for this purpose. And once found, the interested programmer should be able to adopt the recipe's code or idea. No. The true problem with the book and its collection of recipes is ..etc.. Anyway. I welcome Mangano's work. In an indirect way it teaches a lot of wisdom on practical and every-day-use programming, even if the suggested codes not always represent the most efficient codification possible. In comparison, if efficiency and code perfectionism matters, another notable new book in this area (Programming with Mathematica 6.0/7.0, Mathematica As A Programming Language) is Leonid Shifrin's publication (googel, wiki) which, too, contains collections of 'Recipes' (in an effort to be fair and overly modest, he calls them simply 'examples'). Shifrin explains more the intermediate steps (typical one-liner programs) how to get to the final readycode, and in addition, presents several(!) alternative implementations (written in the same programming paradigm with a refined or optimized algorithm/idea, or written in one of the four other programming paradigms) of the same 'Recipe' which are much more efficient and thus, suitable to RL large-scale applications. Shifrin starts where Mangano stops! Depending on your level of programming expertise the one book or the other suits your needs better, so check them out both :) I highly recommend Mangano's book, and even higher Leonid Shifrin book.