Good layout as a reference, but not enough complete examples for newbies. Would help to have example programs available on the web. Still looking for such a book/url combination to follow though a full tutorial.

The presentation of this book is for the most part pretty good, with a few exceptions. The examples chosen are occasionally mystifying but mostly chosen in a way that allowed me to feel I'd learned the basic language without sitting at a console trying examples. The underlying language it describes is remarkably weird and painfully quirky, so coming up with good examples to illustrate that is not always easy. There's a bias toward the M2 implementation, but the book tries to be clear about that, and occasionally notes where that matters--it's hard to be sure without getting a lot of implementations and comparing them how thorough they were on that particular point. Still, overall, I was happy with the book.

This book is a great concise introduction to the MUMPS language and database. As usual with programming books, it is to be read close to a keyboard, while practicing. I would recommend the fis-gtm (GT.M) compiler, that is now a Linux package.