The Study of Programming Languages

In agreement with the other reviewers, this book might notserve well as a first or only introduction to programminglanguages. A good first book would be Programming Pragmaticsor several others. However, this book has a nice integrationof theory (grammars, semantics, lambda calculus) with realprogramming languages, in a relatively concise treatment.There is also some interesting coverage of history.The languages used for case studies or examples are certainlynot archaic, but rather slightly esoteric, such as ML, Ada,and Prolog. Another excellent book covering somewhatesoteric languages along with concise introductions totheory is Programming Languages by Kamin.