Rating: 
Summary: The best book to learn computer language fundamentals
Review: Scott is a marvelous teacher. The book covers everything from language syntax to functional programming with ease and depth. The study of programming languages though skipped by most programmers is an essential element if you want to be a better programmer.
The exercises given at the end of chapters are excellent and will reinforce your understanding. At a time when programming languages are proliferating at an amazing rate, it is essential you know how to compare the various aspects of different languages and choose the one most suitable for your work. Studying this will help you in that endeavour.
Get this book, but better read it.
Rating:
Summary: brilliant
Review: The best (only?) book on the subject of PLs that ties abstract concepts directly to practice. Clear, concise and incredibly thorough in both breadth and depth. A rare pleasure...
Rating:
Summary: brilliant
Review: The best (only?) book on the subject of PLs that ties abstract concepts directly to practice. Clear, concise and incredibly thorough in both breadth and depth. A rare pleasure...
Rating:
Summary: Covers many grounds
Review: This book covers how common imperative languages
implement various programming features. Very extensive.If you want to know how Algol, pascal,
C/C++, Java are implemented, then
this book is for you.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book and looking forward for the next edition
Review: This is a very high quality text/reference book. I feel that I have my money and time well spent. The author's writing style is precise yet accessible. And his model and mindset about explaining programming languge design has been consitent all through -- always about the intricate relations and interactions among those three facets in a language design (syntactic, semantic and pragmatic). This treatment of the subject, in my view, reflects real dynamics of language design, and also makes the text more pratically useful for readers while laying out solid conceptual fundation at the same time. I am looking forward for the next edition, which I am sure that author will include discussion of more recent language examples like C# and XML.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book and looking forward for the next edition
Review: This is a very high quality text/reference book. I feel that I have my money and time well spent. The author's writing style is precise yet accessible. And his model and mindset about explaining programming languge design has been consitent all through -- always about the intricate relations and interactions among those three facets in a language design (syntactic, semantic and pragmatic). This treatment of the subject, in my view, reflects real dynamics of language design, and also makes the text more pratically useful for readers while laying out solid conceptual fundation at the same time. I am looking forward for the next edition, which I am sure that author will include discussion of more recent language examples like C# and XML.
Rating:
Summary: Required for every Compiler Engineer
Review: This is must read for every compiler engineer.
This book is 800+ pages of theory behind language design and processing of languages.
Altought it is very theoretical, it's very easy to read and well written and a pleasure to read. There are a lot of examples/figures/tables etc to explain things. I recommend people which are totally new to language design/compiler design to first read an introduction text. I can really recommend 'programming language processors in java' from Watt and Brown. This is a really good book.
The title of the book suggest that this book will only cover Language Design. In reality chapter 2, 3,4 and 5 covers in depth resp. Syntax checking (parsing), Names/Scope/Binding, Semantic Analysis and processor architecture.
Beside in depth analysis of language design (e.g. OO-, functional-, imperative- and logical-languages) it gives some practical implementation advice/tips. E.g. there are only a few compilerbooks which seriously talks about the different parsing error recovery techniques. This book explain some different recovery methods. Probably error recovery is not scientific enough for the other books, but for a compiler user error recovery is really important.
A last tip: this book comes in 2 editions: a paperback and hardcover edition. If you want to save some money buy the paperback.
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