I am intigued with and have been trying to explore 'emergent behavior' for several months. I am especially enjoying trying to learn and explore with NetLogo. It is the upgraded and much more capable big brother to StarLogo (which this book is about). The main proble that I'm having is that are no printed books that either provide a good reference to the NetLogo lanuage nor any good printed tutorials. I find the electronic versions good but too hard to use...especially while trying to program in NetLogo on the computer.
So I was thinking that this beek looked like a pretty good tutorial on applying StarLogo and, after all, StarLogo is the little brother to NetLogo...so I decided to give it a try. The organization and approach to developing skills with StarLogo are superb and I've enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately, NetLogo is such an advancement over StarLogo that the StarLogo examples and exercises do not translate well (or at all) to NetLogo. So, in that regard, it was a bust for me.
But if you use (or are interested in getting and using StarLogo) then I highly recommend this book. However, if you're interested in NetLogo,I think you'll likely be disappointed.