[programnature]

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.

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'll start learning by finding the analogues of your favorite FP constructs.

WL also has a lot of functions that you might call "optional": 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.