Essentials of Programming Languages - 2nd Edition Review

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Essentials of Programming Languages - 2nd Edition ReviewThis book is invaluable to someone who is trying to understand how computer languages really work.
The Good
1. Very comprehensive .Covers a whole gamut of programming language features.By the time you finish the book you will have built interpreters which demonstrate recursion, call-by-value/reference/need and name semantics, class based and prototype based OO, type inference ,Continuations etc .
2. Very "Hands on" . You are taught how programming languages work by actually building intrepreters (in other words an Operational Semantics is used) .This is the best way to learn .
3.Environments and Continuations are explained extremely well.

4.Lots of exercises which explore design alternatives . For example the main flow deals with lexical binding of variables, with dynamic binding left as an exercise.
The Bad
1. A certain knowledge of scheme (let letrec, cond) etc is assumed (The First edition was better in this respect and was more self contained)
2.The writing is sometimes unnecessarily dense with long sentences and slighly disjonted paragraphs.
3.some essential features of a language design (eg: memory management ) are skipped entirely.While this is understandable from the pov of reducing the length of the book, it also means that one needs to read supplementary material before one can write real life interpreters.
4.Some parts of the interpretation/compilation process are skipped entirely or treated through "magic". For example the book provides practically no explanation of lexing or parsing and some "magic " code (SLLGEN) is used .The examples for using this framework are thoroughly inadequate.It is better to skip using this framework and just use list syntax and the read functionality of scheme .
Summary
With all its faults (which will probably get fixed in the next edition ) this is an incredible book and should be part of the library of every programmer interested in learning how languages work. As far as i know there isn't a single other book that can do better in conveying how various features of languages really work and interact .
While this book may not be suitable for an undergraduate course of study(withoout an excellent teacher to help students get ove r the difficult bits) it is ideal for the self taught programmer .
If you don't mind reading extra material/browsing the web to supplement this book, just buy it.Essentials of Programming Languages - 2nd Edition OverviewThis textbook offers a deep understanding of the essential concepts of programming languages. The approach is analytic and hands-on. The text uses interpreters, written in Scheme, to express the semantics of many essential language elements in a way that is both clear and directly executable. It also examines some important program analyses. Extensive exercises explore many design and implementation alternatives.

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