Thinking Forth is a FANTASTIC book -- by all means read it to learn the most important universal lessons from Forth, even if you're not going to program in it!
Forth is a "glass box" instead of a "black box", and it's simple enough that you can easily understand EVERYTHING about how it works right down to the most primitive words defined by machine instructions. It like scheme in that it's great for meta programming and creating higher level domain specific languages, but its approach is different enough and much lower level than Scheme that it's worth learning scheme as well as forth, to contrast them for a better perspective.
Another interesting related language is PostScript, which is a lot like Forth in some ways (rpn stack based, separate return and parameter (and dictionary scope) stacks, how the threaded interpreter works, and its extreme simplicity and power) but a lot like scheme in other ways (data is code, polymorphic arrays and dictionaries, typed object references instead of raw untyped pointers, with typed objects bound to names in dictionaries as opposed to typed variables holding values (you can redefine the same name to different types, since the object with its type is associated with the key in a dict, the type is not declared for the variable name itself like C), a safe high level language with bounds checking, garbage collection (in a modern implementation -- old printers tend to use simpler heaps), etc).
PostScript (and scheme) is a lot more of a "black box" than Forth is, since there's a lot of magic stuff going on under the hood that you can't see, to make it seem simple on the surface. And I'd say that on the surface, PostScript is simpler than Forth, because of how it's higher level and you don't have to worry about a lot of details. But Forth is actually extremely simple all the way down!
\ First you should:
FORTH ?KNOW IF
HONK!
ELSE
FORTH LEARN!
THEN
\ Then you can:
BEGIN
FORTH THINK!
AGAIN
Forth is a "glass box" instead of a "black box", and it's simple enough that you can easily understand EVERYTHING about how it works right down to the most primitive words defined by machine instructions. It like scheme in that it's great for meta programming and creating higher level domain specific languages, but its approach is different enough and much lower level than Scheme that it's worth learning scheme as well as forth, to contrast them for a better perspective.
Another interesting related language is PostScript, which is a lot like Forth in some ways (rpn stack based, separate return and parameter (and dictionary scope) stacks, how the threaded interpreter works, and its extreme simplicity and power) but a lot like scheme in other ways (data is code, polymorphic arrays and dictionaries, typed object references instead of raw untyped pointers, with typed objects bound to names in dictionaries as opposed to typed variables holding values (you can redefine the same name to different types, since the object with its type is associated with the key in a dict, the type is not declared for the variable name itself like C), a safe high level language with bounds checking, garbage collection (in a modern implementation -- old printers tend to use simpler heaps), etc).
PostScript (and scheme) is a lot more of a "black box" than Forth is, since there's a lot of magic stuff going on under the hood that you can't see, to make it seem simple on the surface. And I'd say that on the surface, PostScript is simpler than Forth, because of how it's higher level and you don't have to worry about a lot of details. But Forth is actually extremely simple all the way down!