Customer Reviews

Principles of Programming Languages: Design, Evaluation, and Implementation

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Today I needed to recommend a book that would treat the ideas and concepts behind good programming. I remembered in college that I had taken a languages course, I looked on my bookshelf, and found this text. I started to re-read it, and found that the ideas and concepts that are covered in this book are still relevant and well treated for today's computing landscape. I only have the 2nd edition so it does not have a treatment of C or C++, but the ideas that it conveyes are still the most important aspect of learning about computer languages. A language you know does not help you with designing good code, however concepts of computer languages will help you no matter what language you code. Inside the cover flap reads a list of principles that are covered throughout the book in each section. Some of them are: Abstraction, Automation, Infomation hiding, Orthogonality, Portability, etc. I would recommend this book to anyone who wanted to learn how to *design* quality software from the ground up. This book will not teach you a language, this book will teach you how to design good code.

This book reads like it was written in 1990 and the author never bothered to do any further research. It makes some good points, but it should not be a first choice for a survey of the state of the art with regard to functional, OO, and logic programming.