Being the rather lame hack that I am, I have to go with Luis and Bryco on this one. The fact that Kerry is involved has already piqued my interest greatly.
I've been dragging my feet for the last ten or so years waiting on the "right" language to grab, and I think C# may be the one. Writing it from an old lispers viewpoint would be a definite plus for me, but not necessary, but then you'd need to start simple for an old hack like me also. One of my biggest complaints about any book on any language is the assumption of the writer that his audience understands a particular concept or phrase simply because it is common place to the writer. (My first endeavor into a Civil program some twenty years ago, and the very first page of the book spoke of DTMs and TINs with not a single bloody word of explanation of what the heck they were, took a week to dig up).
Now for the format of the book; I like the dictionary approach with examples, however I like to see expanded “real” application examples as well. The AutoCAD lisp function help file is a perfect example of what NOT to do with the dictionary approach, (look at Developer Help->Lisp Functions->BOOLE) where the examples given don’t give any clue at all about how to actually use the function in the real world. Sort of, “Here’s how to use it to toggle “PickFirst”, <example code> and it works because this does that, and that does this, and that over there does the other thing. I guess I’m looking not so much for the function definition as I am the “finesse” of its use in application. (Did any of that make any sense at all?)
I’ve paid nearly a hundred bucks for books that turned out to be little more than a door stop, and I’ve paid just a few bucks for books that turned out to be extremely useful. This might send Se8en off the beam, but for a book that will take me by the hand and walk me from “Wuts see-pound?” to truly understanding the concepts of the basic functions, I’d gladly pay a hundred bucks or more. But hey, that’s just me.