This handbook covers little languages and tools programming languages. There are chapters on Troff, AWK, sed, SQL, Tcl/Tk, Perl, and Python. For each language, information on history, syntax, variables, tips and traps is provided.
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In the third volume of the Handbook of Programming Languages series--Little Languages and Tools--editor Peter H. Salus presents several domain-specific programming languages and tools that are critical to getting certain jobs done in real-world applications. Though it is not by any means a comprehensive survey of such "little" languages, this volume covers many of the important ones.
The book starts with a discussion of Pic--a special-purpose language used to generate line drawings and that was used to create all of the diagrams in this volume. Next, there is a chapter on the EQN language for typesetting mathematical formulas. The volume continues with chapters on domain-specific languages in general and Unix formatting languages.
Chapters 5 and 6 cover the awk and sed Unix utilities. A lengthy discussion of SQL and Tcl/Tk follows. The volume also covers Perl and Python--an amazingly useful freeware object-oriented scripting language.
To round off this eclectic selection of languages, volume 3 finishes with coverage of several simple music-oriented languages such as MIDI, MUTRAN, and DDM. Even seasoned programmers are likely to be introduced to new languages in this volume.--Stephen Plain
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
What a God-awful mess!,
By
This review is from: HPL: Little Languages and Tools (Paperback)
I'm giving this two stars because even in a random mess like this, some of the bits are of interest.The first problem here is what a "handbook" should be -- a reference? Or a survey? If it's supposed to be at least somewhat of a survey, as I expect, I'd expect the classification/taxonomy/ontology to be good. But this volume is called "Little Languages and Tools". Well, Forth is a little language, LOGO is a little language, most assembler languages are very little languages, and some say Scheme is a little language -- and none of those are in here! If the editors were simply ontologically lazy, they should have admitted it and just called this volume "Misc/Other/Etc." And what's a "tool"? I recall the introduction saying something about languages used for getting things done. Well, I'd hope most languages are for getting things done! If the editors wanted to express that a possible design goal of languages is making them concise and simple for the most common tasks that one anticipates them being put to, well, 1) good, I think so too, 2) they should have made this a /major/ point, not just an implicature, 3) they should have a good reason for segregating such languages into another volume. The chapter on Perl is merely /excerpted/ from some other sparklingly mediocre book on Perl! Why bother?? For US$50, I don't want shovelware! I'd have liked if this book surveyed non-programming computer languages -- i.e., markup languages. It seems to start to, with PIC, EQN, but then remembers what it's about, and then aborts that interesting topic. The section on music languages is not bad, since there's been little or nothing in the way of surveys of music languages elsewhere. The design of music languages presents special challenges of interest to language designers as well as musicians, and this section at least covers some of them. Not worth the price for the rest of the book tho. The only reason this book isn't a complete waste of money, brains, and talent, is that, despite everything, some of the details of the languages are interesting. However, you could probably be just as edified by thumbing thru documentation of these languages (man pages, tutorials, even just example code) that you could find free on the Net.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Bum Rap?,
By Jevons & Hollerith Books (Columbia, MD USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: HPL: Little Languages and Tools (Paperback)
Some reviews for individual volumes in this set, as well as one for the set as a whole, complain of (1) omissions and (2) unmet expectations. A short quote from Peter Salus' introduction may help put these complaints in context: "The aim . . . is to provide a single comprehensive source of information concerning a variety of individual programming languages and methodologies for computing professionals." This work is intended to show the shape of a discipline and its history. It is not a programmer's reference manual.
Comprehensive does not mean all-inclusive. Any work comprised of many individual contributions is always a compromise, always a bit uneven. And editors have blind spots; on the second page of the introduction Salus omits any mention of Wilhelm Shickard when discussing early calculators. But give the guy a break! He is a linguist by training, not a historian specializing in medieval technology. The publisher could have adjusted buyer expectations by providing a table of contents and list of contributors, as well as an excerpt from the introduction -- information that would then be available both on Amazon and through the Library of Congress catalog. A complete contributor list IS now in the product "Wiki" for this volume. Finally, a careful buyer, unsure whether a purchase will be worthwhile, can always check out a copy from the library first. Even public libraries which might not have this on the shelf can provide it through inter-library loan for a patron.
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