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Essentials of Programming Languages - 2nd Edition
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Author: Daniel P. Friedman, Mitchell Wand, Christopher T. Haynes
List Price: $60.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0262062178
Publisher: MIT Press (29 January, 2001)
Edition: Hardcover
Sales Rank: 172,099
Average Customer Rating: 3.69 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
excellent
I had a lot of fun going through the book and following the steps to build an increasingly sophisticated language interpreter.
Now if only I can get a job writing scheme/lisp code, I'll be all set.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Enjoyed the Class, Didn't care for the Textbook
I took Friedman's undergraduate Programming Languages course at Indiana University and though this book was the required text
Friedman used it sparingly, as did I. It's full of formal programming language theory and enough EBNF grammars to satisfy the purist while confusing the practioner. To Friedman's credit, he is realistic about the book's audience (graduate,doctoral, and post-doctoral) and about the prevalence of Scheme outside of academia. The chapters on continuations and object oriented programming, however, are quite accessible and interesting reading. Though he doesn't do it much in the book, Friedman decoupled the course from Scheme several times and we examined everything from C's setjmp, longjmp mechanisms to C++'s virtual method lookup implementation. Word of advice to those taking a course taught by Friedman: Don't miss a single lecture or you will be hopelessly lost.
Buy this book if you are interested in formal programming language theory. Don't buy this book if you are interested in learning a specific language or are put off by a dense, rigorous approach to learning programming languages. In any event, best
of luck with your studies.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Essential but insufficient
For better or for worse, this book is probably the best general "hands-on" introduction to programming language concepts, showing students how to write interpreters for a variety of programming-language paradigms. It covers what many computer scientists consider the most important ones: functional programming, object-oriented programming, type systems/inference, and logic programming (though it gives short shrift to the latter).Teachers love the book because it takes a unified, minimalist approach, using the simple, elegant language Scheme. Students seem to hate the book for the same reason, complaining that the details of Scheme divert attention from the concepts themselves. This situation makes it essential to supplement the book with programming assignments in actual languages (Java, ML, Prolog), so students can see what all the trouble is for, and what's really exciting about the ideas in the book. Otherwise, reading this book is like learning how to build a car without ever having seen one!
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