Programming Languages

Rating:
Summary: Don't Settle for this....
Review: Buy Sebesta's book instead. This book sucks!

Rating:
Summary: Too vague. There are better books.
Review: I had the author as a professor and his teaching is like the book: vague and incomplete. The book tries to cover too much and therefore fails to go into depth on any subject. The book doesn't provide enough information to answer many of the chapter questions and I find that absolutely unaccepatable in a textbook. I found the chapter on program language history interesting, but that alone cannot make up for the book's failures. The book is in the $100 price range which is a joke.

Rating:
Summary: Good Course textbook
Review: I used this book as a textbook for my comparative programming languages course.

The book presents the various programming paradigms without getting into the details. It is useful reading for the 3rd year computing science student by putting programming into perspective and getting into the phylosophy behind some aspects of programming.

Rating:
Summary: Too vague and general
Review: I used this book for my programming language concepts course, and I was quite disappointed. It's just way too vague, trying to cover too many things. And few, if any, of the concepts from chaper to chapter carry through to develop a cohesive understanding. I also think most people who'd consider this book (or take a class requiring it) should have the knack to pick this stuff up pretty quickly from experimenting and perhaps a website tutorial or two.

I did enjoy the chapter on axiomatic semantics, which offers a straightforward approach to proving programs and more importantly loop invariants. But that was hardly worth nearly $100.

Rating:
Summary: helpful to understand different programming paradigms
Review: My students and me have translated this book to Chinese.
It will appear soon.

In my opinion, this book is better than that by
Pratt ( I have translated the 3rd and 4th edition of that book
years ago).