Essentials of Programming Languages, third edition (Mit Press)

I've taught fundamentals of programming languages, a course for 2nd year undergraduate students, using this book and it's been a success. The reader must know how to program in order to understand the book, I accept that, but the idea of teaching the basis of programming languages by creating one is great. Additionally, the use of Scheme as a language for developing is crucial.On the other hand, the quality of the book and the paper are good. It has a lot of very decent exercises and the subjects are well-explained.

I had to buy this book for a class, but it's definitely been worth the investment and it's probably one I'll keep after the class is over. Friedman does a great job of relating the concepts covered in the book to examples written in Scheme.

Very helpful in describing a complicated language

For several years I've taught an advanced undergraduate programming language course using the second edition of this book. Now I think I see why it's priced at $60, and the third edition is only $44. The third edition loses the simplicity and elegance of the second, replacing it with unnecessary abstraction and complexity (expressed versus denoted values), and treating the fun, hands-on part (implementation in Scheme) almost as an afterthought.If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I haven't read it all yet but I'd say that this is very good introduction to programming languages, all the basics are there so that even though you don't know much about this topic (formal languages, parser etc ) you don't get lost. Knowing Scheme or other Lisp dialect is a prerequisite even though you don't need deep knowledge as all the code is shown in Scheme. For some reason, I don't know what it reminded me SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) from Abelson and Sussman, possibly it's the quality and topic. It has lots of examples and exercises and you get to really develop a complete interpreter. It is more focused on concepts rather than technical details for which I'd look into the Dragon Book (Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools). Over all I'm very happy with this book and I'd recommend it to anybody who really wants to understand how programming languages work. It's not an easy read for Sunday afternoon it's a comprehensive dense learning material.