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Message from Dean - May 8th 2007
I am currently testing out a new version of the APF Bridge Component - If you notice any errors within this demo store please drop me a line.
List Price: $62.00Amazon.com's Price: $49.60 You Save: $12.40 (20%)Prices subject to change.
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.13
EAN: 9780262062176
Edition: 2
ISBN: 0262062178
Label: The MIT Press
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 408
Publication Date: January 29, 2001
Publisher: The MIT Press
Studio: The MIT Press
Alternate Versions: Click to Display
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
This 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.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
its really a nice book to start with functional programming and thinkin in terms of recursion. you can easily write a cool interpreter by following this book cover to .... doesnt explain lambda calculus and combinators in much detail though
Rating:  -
I enjoyed this book's implementation-oriented approach to teaching language constructs, in the tune of such classics as SICP. The book title is misleading in that this book focuses almost exclusively on functional languages. But within that realm, it admittedly does cover a broad range of features. The book has just the right amount of formal notation to insure relative completeness, but not so much as to scare away unfamiliar readers. I think it's a nice gentle introduction to the whole field.
As I alluded to, the only reason I didn't give this a 5-star is the slightly misleading general-purposeness appeal, even though it really is entirely functional-oriented. Other than that, the book was a great read.
Rating: -
This 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 ... Read More
Rating:  -
I honestly don't understand why professors choose this book to teach programming language concepts/semantics. The best books to learn from are written in simple, easy to read language, and with a well-designed index. EOPL lacks both of these attributes.
As a part of the class we had to take reading quizzes on each section, meaning we had to read this book cover to cover. Friedman used complex, difficult to understand language to teach concepts that themselves were difficult to grasp. To make matters worse, the professor simply read from the book during lecture, failing to clarify the mysteries created by Friedman.
An optional book for the class was Programming Language Pragmatics. It explained the implementations of Object Oriented languages, type checking, assembly, etc. using multiple languages people have used before, unlike scheme. I would suggest looking at that book before choosing EOPL.
Rating: -
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.
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