Daniel P. Friedman

Essentials of Programming Languages may sound like a fairly simple, noobish book. "Hey, I need to learn about programming languages. Where do I start?" Well, sad to say, it's not that kind of essentials. Reading EOPL as an intro to programming languages is like reading a book-length "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" by Watson and Crick to get you started on biology.

That isn't to say this book isn't great. It is. It's just for a more advanced show more programmers who have a sturdy foundation already in programming. A sturdy foundation, that is, that can be readily swept away while Friedman et al. blow your mind with aspects of programming languages you would have never thought before.

I recommend this book for anybody pursuing a career or education in computer science or its related fields, and not for the introductory programmer, unless that introductory programmer is also an advanced mathematician. show less

After reading Gödel, Escher and Bach I was determined to learn a LISP, just because I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I won't bother anyone with the details, but arriving at Scheme was a struggle at best.
Being familiar with recursion for the most part on the Prolog and Haskell side of things I was a little hesitant to use this book as my introduction to scheme. And, sure enough, I blew through the first 6 chapters in a day. The second day, I decided that it would be useful to program show more all the things in parallel to the next chapters, which had me going back to previous chapters to write out these functions as well. This was very useful if only to get familiar with the syntax of Scheme.
Then, the final 3 chapters of the book broke my brain a little. I was not at all familiar with continuation so this was a struggle. Chapter 9 and 10 were very difficult, but also a lot of fun. I'm definately re-reading those in the near-future.
I don't know why, but the kiddy-style of the book and the unusual Q/A build kind of work very well and make it less textbook-y. It at least worked a lot better for me than the daunting "Practical Common LISP" (which is probably a very good programming-book, but which I found extremely boring). show less

Reader response, freshly finished: Unsure how I feel about this book.

I really love the didactic style. I found it easy to keep pace. It taught Scheme in a really digestible way .... until the end.

At least, I think it stopped being that digestible by the end. As someone who knows Scheme and understands the concepts (reasonably well), I found slowing down to be difficult, and I also didn't feel the book convinced me why I'd go through the contortions the latter half of the book made me go show more through.
With my "non-programmer" hat on, I was willing to take the leaps of faith required in the first half of the book while it immediately paid off, by about "Shadows" I stopped seeing why I was learning what I was learning. The authors were being too cute (or maybe holding onto too much for the sequel "The Seasoned Schemer")

Anyone who wants to teach someone programming concepts would do well to learn this book and encourage the use of a REPL. It's a great book for someone who understands programming languages, PL theory, and PL concepts to learn how to teach them to others in an approachable way.

I'd like to see how someone who has no idea or agenda for learning how to program would do with this book. I feel most people would really benefit from the first half and then get frustrated by the second. show less

I love the idea of using a Socratic dialogue, but the execution falls flat. I'd love to see an interactive version of this material, but at that point, finding a human mentor might be even better. I'd worked through the first 3 chapters of SICP a few years before reading this, so I flew through the first 7 chapters. I did find the food based examples tiresome after a while. More descriptive naming would benefit the presentation.

Chapter 8 I stumbled through by stepping through the execution show more of the examples. Chapter 9 is the climax, but here the conceit really breaks down, because I didn't find the dialogue leading me anywhere. Fortunately I found a discussion on Stack Overflow that more explicitly explained why the authors had taken the path they did: http://stackoverflow.com/a/11864862

After reading that comment, it was, a ha, now Chapter 8 makes sense, at least as far as motivation. I can't help but think that if the authors used this text in a classroom setting, they must have had extra materials, or at least more complete in class discussions about what was going on.

If you have a math background, might be better off looking for a text that explicitly covers the lambda calculus. show less