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 | | Programming Languages: Concepts and Constructs by Ravi Sethi ISBN-10: 9780201590654 ISBN-10: 0-201-59065-4 ISBN-13: 9780201590654 ISBN-13: 978-0-201-59065-4 Hardcover 1996-02 Addison Wesley Publishing Company Find Lowest Price |
Reviews | ||
An fantastic book in my opinion Most of the previous comments are either very favourable to the book (i.e. 4 or 5 stars) or completely against it (1 star). According to me, this book is a fantastic book IF YOU LIKE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES. These are the languages I use (from time to time) on my Linux box: AWK, Scheme, LISP, C/C++, Java, Python and Ruby. I'm also trying to understand AspectJ, Oz and Erlang. I think this book is made for persons like me who find pleasure discovering and using new programming languages (and paradigms). I can understand that if you are a professional programmer (i.e. doing it for a living), this book is of (relatively) little value. Personally, I love this book! | ||
terrible, Terrible, TERRIBLE As a software engineering undergrad, I read pools of books, and as far as the study of programming languages go, there are many terrible books on the subject: this is one of them. I checked this out from our school library, got home, began to read and didn't make it past the first 3 or 4 pages in the first chapter. The author's writing style is too verbose and too wordy - oftentimes, in a single paragraph, he'll repeat what he just said a couple sentences ago, albeit in different wording. And the book contains these stupid one-sentence sidebar notes for each chapter subheading. The subheadings are so ill-placed, I struggled to figure out what part they added to the continuity of the text - there's no lucidity, whatsoever. And be careful: I didn't read far enough to encounter any of what I'm about to say but other reviewers of this book have mentioned the code examples are highly flawed, and sometimes just flat out wrong. According to other reviewers, the text "Programming Language Pragmatics" by Michael L. Scott (ISBN: 1558604421) is excellent, and I plan on purchasing it sometime soon. If you're like me, you'll want to understand what makes your compiler/interpreter tick and how the lower-level constructs interact with them. This book SUCKS! Peace! | ||
Just because it's challenging doesn't mean it's bad I hated this book when it was the assigned text in my programming languages course. But having just graduated with a BS in CS, I went back and looked thru this book after seeing the negative reviews here. After taking courses like compiler and multi-threaded programming, I feel the book does an excellent job of showing how programming languages evolved, and why. Some of the examples are a little abstract(i agree that the quilt example is too hard to follow, and is spread over too many pages), but for a book that is trying to show the reasons languages evolved it does a good job. | ||
In words: awful I noticed that Amazon is ordering more copies of this book. How very sad.... Like smallpox, this book could be eradicated if we all got together and decided to do something about it. What Ravi really needed during the writing of this horrific pile of miscommunication were several humans to have attempted to read the book before its publication. In words: an editor. He also might simply consider not using the construct "In Words:". The fact that Ravi must alert the reader ahead of time that he is going to use words to describe something should give you a fairly good idea as to the delightful cadence and pacing he executes throughout. I wish I could post an example of his [his majesty ravi] prose style; but, alas, I think I lit the book on fire along with some old underwear. | ||
Good, but not $100 good This is a good book, and the section on Functional Programming is especially interesting. Almost every other book in this area omits FP. (The Pratt book comes to mind as one guilty of this omission.) Having said that, I don't believe that I would pay $100+ for this text. Buy it used! | ||