Customer Reviews

Programming Languages: Principles and Practice

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

This is probably the worst textbook on this topic because it does little justice to the concepts. I found it hard to understand exactly what the book was talking about and what the exercise questions were asking. In many cases, I was unable to find any corelating content in the book, between questions and answers.

The book also references some languages such as ADA , FORTRAN, ML, etc. Unfortunately, it simply touches each one vaguely. I was REALLY put off by this book. It is very verbose and does not approach topics in a linear way. I used the book for an online course and resorted to consulting other books, such as "Learning Computer Programming: It's Not About Languages" by Mary E. Farrell.

This book is very vague, doesn't go into enough detail about anything and the examples and practice problems are badly worded and poorly explained. HORRIBLE. I've heard that Programming Language Pragmatics by Michael L. Scott is a great book.

I bought this book for a course that was designed to cover general topics regarding syntax, semantics, and the process of compilation/interpretation for the variety of programming languages that exist.

My issues with this book:
-- The chapters don't fit together; I often feel like I am reading several books all smashed into one.
-- The examples are missing depth; many examples do not have good descriptions or explanations.
-- The topics need more content; most topics bring up many questions that are never answered.
-- The information has no organization; I have found many definitions and explanations that are related but nowhere near each other within a chapter.
-- The index is misleading; many topics do not even appear in the index and the topics that do appear don't list all of the important page number references.

I wish a better book had been required for the course.

I purchased this book on Kindle for a class in programming languages this semester and it was marginally useful to get an idea what I would be responsible for (so that I could then read about the topics in a different source). *Specifically in the Kindle version: The code examples are completely unreadable since there are no carriage returns, spaces, or other style/formatting that a human generally expects when reading code. In addition to the jumbled code examples, there are lot of typographical errors in this book. I don't recommend it. I have looked at a few different printed versions, and they have the same typos.

Excellent product and very fast shipping. I got it before my class begin, so i have enough time to review contents before class. Thanks!

I bought the Kindle edition of this textbook, both to save money and to save lugging around another large book. The code samples did not translate well into the Kindle edition, and most of them appear as paragraphs of text, with the lines all run together. This, as you probably know, is a really unreadable way to understand code. Save yourself the trouble and buy the paper edition until this can be fixed.

It arrived in a very bad condition. I don't want to try the seller again.

Buy Sebesta's book instead. This book sucks!

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).