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Customer Reviews (32)

Essential Reading for Anyone Interested in Politics, Writing, Semantics, or Logic
For me, this book is near-scriptural because it packs so much truth into such a small space.This book will help you understand how you think and how you use language, and why people talk past each other and disagree about important topics.It explains in entertaining detail many of the fallacies and traps we all fall prey to, and some of the conditions of modern life that make them more pervasive.This is one of those books that will make you wonder how you could live so long without realizing such important and simple things.If you want to examine your own thinking and root out errors--if you want to inject additional rationality into your political beliefs--if you want to raise your immunity to advertising and misleading propaganda--or if you want to write and think more precisely, this book is invaluable.

Dull but good
The preface of the book says it was written in "response to the dangers of propaganda", especially Adolph Hitler's.So the book is very much not propaganda.The author prefers to be slow, dull, and thoughtful rather than passionate, engaging and vacant.

The book hammers home that language is like a map which, if it's good, reflects reality.Propaganda tries to build a map that is self-consistent and appears good, but is really wrong.The author shows the ways bad "maps" are built and how to not fall for one.

The book is worth its price for Chapter 1.This is an attack on the premise that life is a jungle and that we all need to fight each other to survive.The author does a magnificent job of saying that not every animal fights itself to survive and that humans are at our best when we cooperate, for we can do little on our own and even less if we tear each other apart.

I'm giving it four stars, because it was a slow trod to read and I feel that the author erred too much on the side of dryness in order to show the book was not propaganda.Although I understand why he did.That said, it is a good and informative book.

Rational and Logical
This book helps the reader think rationally without the usual philosophical impenetrability that accompanies the result.If you are already a rational human, you'll gain better understanding of advertising copy and hype.This book can be a revelation if you haven't seen the concepts presented before, and it is extremely readable (for the field).Recommended.

Not the book I thought I was ordering
The book I got was in very good condition, and arrived quickly.However, it was not exactly the same Book that I thought I was ordering, which was "Language in Thought and Action".The book I got was "Language in Action" published 1941.

Read and re-read
The best and easiest to understand in the field of semantics -- always fascinating.I review it every few years and enjoy it all over again. ... Read more

Product Description
Get a better grade in General Chemistry!

Even though General Chemistry may be challenging at times; with hard work and the right study tools, you can still get the grade you want. With David Klein's General Chemistry as a Second Language, you'll be able to better understand fundamental principles of chemistry, solve problems, and focus on what you need to know to succeed.

Here's how you can get a better grade in General Chemistry:

• Understand the basic concepts: General Chemistry as a Second Language focuses on selected topics in General Chemistry to give you a solid foundation. By understanding these principles, you'll have a coherent framework that will help you better understand your course.
• Study more efficiently and effectively: General Chemistry as a Second Language provides time-saving study tips and problem-solving strategies that will help you succeed in the course.
• Improve your problem-solving skills: General Chemistry as a Second Language will help you develop the skills you need to solve a variety of problem types - even unfamiliar ones! ... Read more

  Customer Reviews (15)

  Easy to Read / Practice Problems have errors?
  Pros:
  
  Easy To Read
  
  Concepts explained in simple, concise sentences
  
  Cons:
  
  Answers to some practice problems are incorrect
  
  As a new student of Chemistry, unable to determine what is accurate/correct & what is not...
  
  Purchased this in anticipation of enrolling into a college level General Chemistry course, with the intent of 'getting ahead' while I had free time. But as I started working throught the Chapter 1 practice questions, I noticed the answer key had some glaring errors (problems 1.9 & 1.17, for example). I'm literally with in the first 6 pages of the book & I, a novice, am finding mathematical errors?
  
  Makes me wonder if I should trust anything I read in this...

  As a second language books are amazing
  I struggled to understand general chemistry for about a year, my professor recommended this book and it's been so helpful, it's really easy to understand and is such a small and light size you can carry it anywhere. I plan on buying more from the series!

  A great tool to master the essentials of Gen Chem I
  I purchased General Chemistry I as a Second Language about 1/4 of the way through the semester, when I realized I really would need as much help as I could get for this course. The textbook we used, Chemistry: A Molecular Approach, isn't bad, but my professor was awful and wouldn't offer any additional insight into what we were learning. I wanted to make sure that I mastered the core concepts necessary to excel in General Chemistry I. This book really stood up to the challenge. I had already seen the glowing reviews for this and the two Organic books by Klein, so I figured it was a safe investment.
  
  I worked through the entire book, but where this book really was a masterpiece and was worth its weight in gold was when it came to the final chapters dealing with Lewis structures, resonance structures, and, above all, molecular geometry.
  
  Klein shines in this book because he is one of those educators that truly knows his stuff and, above all, has a gift for teaching. He can explain complicated material in a way that makes it sound simple and helps alleviate fears while talking to you on an educated level that doesn't assume you're an idiot. His explanation on resonance structures really drove home the idea for me, bceause I wasn't quite grasping the concept 100% until his peach and pear analogy.
  
  If you use this book as a supplement to your course, reading the corresponding chapters as you go along to make sure you grasp the material (and not just leaving it until the last minute to learn chemistry before the final) you can only come out winning in the end. I wouldn't go so far as to say it guarantees you an A, since the difficulty and fairness of the examinations varies from university to university, but if you're interested in LEARNING chemistry, you can't go wrong with this book. You will learn, and you will definitely be thankful to have learned these fundamental skills later on.
  
  Note that this book only covers what it deems are "fundamental skills"and is not a complete supplement. For example, my Gen Chem I course covered the quantum mechanical theory of the electron, and this book didn't cover that, but I didn't expect it to. Nor is there much in the way of practice with complex mathematical/stoich questions. I would recommend supplementing this with a book like General College Chemistry by Schaum's, which should have you covered. Plus, there sadly is not a General Chemistry II as a Second Language. I wish there was, but I guess I'll have to make do without Prof. Klein's helping hand until I get to Organic in the fall.
  
  On the whole, if you want to guarantee that you understand the fundamental concepts of chemistry, you can't go wrong with this book. $31 may seem steep, but in my opinion, this book was worth every penny for its explanation of molecular geometry alone!

  TYPOS EVERYWHERE
  Are you serious?What is wrong with the rest of you?There are 3 major errors in the first 35 questions.Ironically it's in the part about the importance of the precision in your answers. Terrible.Returning ASAP.

  great aid
  Very nice book for gen chem one of the best most succinct study books out there! ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (11)

Best for General Purpose Languages
I bought this book hoping for some help in writing a parser for a simple imperative language with almost 2000 keywords.Unfortunately, I got no help.There is a lot of good advice in this book for writing a compiler or interpreter for a general purpose language with a reasonable number of keywords.If you know ANTLR, it is even better.I guess I'll try Domain-Specific Languages (Addison-Wesley Signature Series) next.

Any programmer's library needs this
Terence Parr's LANGUAGE IMPLEMENTATION PATTERNS: CREATE YOUR OWN DOMAIN-SPECIFIC AND GENERAL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES tells how to build file readers, data readers, code generators and more - without a strong computer science background. The author offers insights into common design patterns key to development for Java and other programmers, creating a guide that isn't language-specific, but pattern-oriented. Any programmer's library needs this.

A must have for developers
I was terribly interested in getting my hands on this book since I'm taking a formal course on Compilers and Interpreters at university and I really wanted to know: What's the difference between what we (as computer scientists) are taught in a compilers' course and the more practical approach presented in the book?

As it turns out there's a big difference. If you want to be the ultimate guru of compilers (eg. contributing an even more efficient compiling technique for language X or creating a language that forces us all to reconsider what we know about compilers) you need both, the theory the practice (because without the theory you wouldn't know how to improve or make obsolete an existing technique, and without the practice you wouldn't be able to put that knowledge to work inside a language compiler). Now if you just want to be able to deal with your DSL (domain specific language), create data readers, code generators, source-to-source translators, source analyzers, etc. you'll love the hands on information presented in this book.

Let's be honest, how many of us developers are required or willing to create a language from scratch together with its compiler or interpreter versus the ones that just need to parse an XML file, process a DSL or create a configuration file reader? I would say that there are much more developers in the later group. But fortunately we all (or almost all) share one thing in common: we know software patterns! This is how the author structured the book, offering patterns (ala Gamma et al) that you can use when creating your language processors (an excellent approach in my opinion since each pattern focuses on different stages of language processing which helps the developer modularize the solution and understand how the different parts of the "machine" work without loosing sight of the big picture).

So, in case you're wondering "what is this guy talking about?". A compiler is a program that transforms code created in one language into another (eg. C source code into executable code). Normally the transformation goes from a higher level language to a lower level language (eg. to machine code)(if it's the other way round we have a "decompiler"). When the transformation happens between languanges on the same level we're dealing with a language translator or converter (normally called "source-to-source translator")(eg. Sharpen, an open source framework created by the db4o team that converts Java code to C#). A compiler is likely to perform several operations such as lexical analysis, preprocessing, parsing, semantic analysis, code generation, and code optimization (which are directly or indirectly covered in the patterns offered in the book). The ultimate tool for developers interested in building compilers is a compiler-compiler or parser generator which, as you might have already guessed, provides a high level description language to help you build your own compiler (this usually involves the creation of a lexer and a parser).

However, I feel I should mention that there's a whole lot of complexity in handling and maintaining all the intermediate information when you're creating your own compiler for your own language which is covered only indirectly in this book. There's also no detailed explanation of the final steps of a compiler implementation such as machine code generation and optimization, register allocation, etc. Overall this is an excellent book for day-to-day language applications (involving parsing, translations, etc).

Now I find pretty important to mention who the author is. Terence Parr created the ANTLR parser generator (antlr.org) and the StringTemplate engine (stringtemplate.org). He's a professor of computer science that's no theorist (this guys has real practical experience!). He has so much experience that he started to see these patterns when developing language processors coming again and again. The end result is this book that presents a compilation of those patterns.

The structure of the book is pretty straight forward. Four general parts:

* Getting Started with Parsing: where you'll learn about the general architecture of language applications and review the patterns that involve parsing.
* Analyzing Languages: where you'll see how to use the parsing techniques described in the previous section to build trees that hold language constructs in memory, how to walk those trees to track and identify various symbols (such as variables and functions) and how to determine the type of the expressions. Overall you'll learn how to check whether an input stream makes sense.
* Building Interpreters: four interpreter patterns are presented that vary in terms of implementation difficulty and run-time efficiency. In the two previous parts the focus was on patterns that verify the syntax of an input sentence and make sure that it follows a set of semantic rules. In this part the focus is on patterns for processing the input sequences (not just validating them).
* Translating and Generating Languages: here you'll learn how to translate one language to another and how to generate text using the StringTemplate engine.


The patterns are laid in the order you'd follow to implement a language (section 1.2, "A Tour of Patterns" describes how all the patterns fit together). There are 31 patterns in the book, each with four parts: purpose, discussion, implementation and related patterns. The implementation section provides illustrative code in Java (but it's not meant to serve as a library). You don't need a background in language theory or compilers to understand the book but you have to have a solid programming background and be confortable with the concept of recursion in algorithms.

Overall, if you're a developer that has to deal with any of the use cases described in this review this book *must* be in your bookshelf (but if you're really into compilers you should also have Aho's Dragon book next to it =)

Way better than sifting through textbooks
I had to read the classic Dragon book in college. I'm glad I did and feel that all software developers should go through the mental process of learning to build a compiler. Doing so ties together all the classes that come before it, from data structures to theory of computation. But, the texts on those subjects are quite dense and not quite practical for the working developer.

This book fills that gap quite nicely. It is free of excess jargon and gets right to the point of creating new languages. Each chapter builds up the reader's repertoire of techniques and tools for writing programs that create programs. For a relatively short book, the author does a fine job of covering scanning, parsing, type checking, interpreters, virtual machines and code generation.

If you've ever wanted to build your own language but fell short when it came to the theory behind it, this book is the one to check out.

Dragon book for the rest of us
Terence has put together a book that is both readable and relevant. In clear, lucid -- even fun -- prose, he demystifies the all-too-often arcane world of language design and processing. While other language processing and compiler books are awash in the theoretical details needed to plumb the depths of the discipline, Language Implementation Patterns gives practical, useful advice on building real-world language processors to solve practical problems. Not content to tilt with cartoon dragons, Terence gives us the armor we've needed all along -- in a way that no Dragon Book ever has.

We are all beneficiaries of Terence's design and implementation of ANTLR. His previous book on the same, coupled with this new volume, empower us to solve manifold thorny problems. It's always exciting to add a new tool to one's technical toolbox, and we've now got complete operating instructions for a very sharp and capable one.
... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

Epic poetic narrative
Neruda's Canto General is a poetic retelling of the history of South and Central America from the late pre-Columbian era to the middle of the twentieth century.The book is set up like a novel, with chapters and subheadings, a straight-line narration, and a cast of characters.Neruda's communist ideology is visible throughout the work and is a major theme.Canto General leaves the reader with an interesting impression of American history seen through the eyes of the impoversihed people of South America, as well as an idea of how third-world communists perceive reality.This is truly an excellent work, and should be read by everyone.

Truly the American Bible.
This is one of Neruda's greatest books. It is a jorney through the history of the American Continent, from its creation, to its conquest until the present day. Most readers will know it from its chapter 'Hights of Machu Picchu' but it is certainly more than that.

It is a review of 500 hundred years of history, of war, of love, of betray. Obviously the book is a reflection of Neruda's left wing inclination, but that only adds to the book.

In Chile and other parts of Latin America this book is called "The American Bible" and it truly is. Along with Residencia en la Tierra, it is probably Neruda's finest. And is probably the book in which Neruda became what he though his role as a poet ought to be "a voice for all who had no voice". ... Read more

Product Description
Spolsky here examines the conditions under which languages are learned, and how learning related to teaching.His theory, set out in the form of a preference model, emphasizes the need to be precise and clear on the nature of the goals and outcomes of learning, and to recognize the complexity of the concept of "knowing a second language." ... Read more

Product Description
Programming Language Pragmatics is the most comprehensive programming language textbook available today. Taking the perspective that language design and language implementation are tightly interconnected, and that neither can be fully understood in isolation, this critically acclaimed and bestselling book has been thoroughly updated to cover the most recent developments in programming language design. With a new chapter on run-time program management and expanded coverage of concurrency, this new edition provides both students and professionals alike with a solid understanding of the most important issues driving software development today.

• Classic programming foundations text now updated to familiarize students with the languages they are most likely to encounter in the workforce, including including Java 7, C++, C# 3.0, F#, Fortran 2008, Ada 2005, Scheme R6RS, and Perl 6.


• New and expanded coverage of concurrency and run-time systems ensures students and professionals understand the most important advances driving software today.


• Includes over 800 numbered examples to help the reader quickly cross-reference and access content.

Topics covered: A survey of today's programming languages, compilation vs. interpretation, the compilation process, regular expression and context-free grammars, scanners and parsers, names, scopes and bindings, scope rules, overloading, semantic analysis, introduction to computer architecture, representing data, instruction sets, 680x0 and MIPs architectures, control flow and expression evaluation, iteration and recursion, data types, type checking, records, arrays, strings, sets, pointers, lists, file I/O, subroutines, calling sequences and parameter passing, exception handling, coroutines, compile back-end processing, code generation, linking, object-oriented programming basics, encapsulation and inheritance, late binding, multiple inheritance, functional and logical languages, Scheme and Prolog, programming with concurrency, shared memory and message passing, and code optimization techniques. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (25)

Comprehensive Programming Language reference

Well written and organized text with in depth history and explanation for Programming Language Pragmatics.

good book
I am currently using this book for a class in programming semantics.The book is clear in its explanations and diagrams.I also like the additional content on the CD... this is the first book CD that I have used more than once!In my opinion great book.

a fine text
I have found this book to be useful as a means of becoming familiar with the considerations that one needs to keep in mind when designing programming languages. I found that I needed a supplementary book on theory of computation, as those topics are relevant, but not covered in this book. On the whole, it's a well-written book, but certainly not one that teaches how to program, nor how to implement a compiler. Look elsewhere for those
kinds of practical details. This book moves too fast for that.

Required Reading for Debugging and Memory Dump Analysis
Every debugging engineer needs to know how the code is interpreted or compiled. Debugging complex problems or doing memory analysis on general-purpose operating systems often requires understanding the syntax and semantics of several programming languages and their run-time support. The knowledge of optimization techniques is also important for low-level debugging when the source code is not available. The following book provides an overview of all important concepts and discusses almost 50 languages. I read the first edition 6 years ago and I liked it so much that I'm now reading the third edition from cover to cover.

Thanks,
Dmitry Vostokov
Founder of DumpAnalysis Portal
Editor-in-Chief of Debugged! MZ/PE magazine

Excellent book, but will not do the intended job
I enjoy the book very much. The author gives an over all introduction to the basics of the programming languages. It does not, however, dig deep into any specific area. To master in a specialized subject, one will have to seek help from other books.

As the author has stated, to learn all the subjects the book is covering, one will have to spend years (taking different courses in computer science). This book has include all the material to give an overall view of the big picture and the students are suppose to learn the material in 2 semesters.

I personally tend to think that the book is better suited for the experienced programmer for the reviewing purposes. Students that never have real world experience probably will feel the book to be very dry. ... Read more

Product Description
The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Japanese language; Foreign Language Study / Japanese; ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Ancient Book
This is a translation of a 16th century Latin grammar of Japanese. (This isn't even the good 16th century Latin grammar of Japanese; this is the shorter one summarized by someone stuck in the Latin model of grammar.) If what you are expecting is a modern grammar, look again. If you want a view into the how the 16th century Jesuits described Japanese, this is just the book for you.

Only useful as a novelty
This is an anachronism.It's free, which is good.It's not at all useful, which is bad. ... Read more

Product Description
The beating heart of the .NET Framework is the Common Language Runtime (CLR), which manages the loading and execution of all code running on the platform, provides key enabling services such as JIT compilation, garbage collection, exception management, the security model, debugging and profiles support, native platform integration and much, much more. The CLR is an implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), an international standard ratified by the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA), and is the first and most significant implementation of the CLI. This book specifies how the system goes together, and is indispensible for anyone who wants to understand the CLI or CLR. The many annotations explain and expand on the original standard, clarifying it and connecting the dots to make the system understandable. These annotations are direct from the ECMA CLI team and the Microsoft CLR team, and are available nowhere else. There is truly no competition out - or expected - for this book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

belongs in the library of every language, library, and tool designer

Excerpt from C# Online.NET Review (wiki.CSharp-Online.NET):
"...this book goes beyond the online documentation to clarify and amplify the original standard and describe its implementation.... the single source programmers, language and tool designers, and library and VES developers need to render the CLI and the CLR fully comprehensible."

A unique 'insiders' look at many details that would otherwise not be exposed
This is not just a reference guide (although it is a very good one). It is also (due to the annotations, often funny) that give you insight into the 'why' behind thing like naming, design decisions, things that were internally debated that we would not normally know about, and in general you come away feeling like you were there creating .NET. I find it required reading and often use it as a reference. 5 stars. An amazing read.

Kind Regards,
Damon Carr
(...)

Excellent Reference Guide
Well, you know it's a winner b/c it's in Addison Wesley's Microsoft .Net Development series.Like their Hejlsberg title, this is pure reference.However, there's a lot to it (almost 900 pages in total) and EVERYTHING in the CLS is covered here. It's very technical, and definitely not a cover to cover read, but there are many good examples and if you need a quick reference for any topic in the Framework, this book is a must have.

Interesting Commingling of Languages
When Microsoft released its .NET platform, it attempted, and is attempting, something quite audacious. It is putting forth a programming environment whereby you could combine modules written in different languages, without recompiling, let alone rewriting.

Arguably, Microsoft set itself a harder task than did Sun with java. Along this road, as the book describes, a standard arose - the Common Language Infrastructure. It describes a Virtual Execution System and what type of executable code can use it. So a version of Pascal, say, that wanted to run on a VES would need to pass the compilation rules of a Pascal compiler that adhered to CLI.

An analogy might help. In some rough way, you might consider CLI + VES to be like a java virtual machine, and the choice of a language to use atop CLI to be like running java under its jvm. Granted, this is crude, but many readers are probably unfamiliar with CLI, whilst having more acquaintance with java.

Warning. The book may be heavy sledding for most. The main audience is compiler writers and language developers. Daresay that even experienced developers may not usually deal with a language at this level.

A slight irony is that CLI is meant to decouple programmers from any specific platform, which is why Microsoft pushed it over to a standards body. But the most developed instantiation currently appears to be .NET, which is inextricably interwoved with Microsoft's operating systems.

Wow! The authorative coverage of the CLI (.NET) standard
.NET, unlike Java, is an implementation of an ECMA and a ISO standard.
This book, from the Microsoft employees that created .NET and with input from members of the standards bodies, annotates the standard with comments that provide insights into the reasoning behind the standard. If you are in one of these categories, you should seriously consider buying this book:
1. advanced .NET developers
2. language designers
3. tool designers
4. those interested in understanding virtual machines
5. developers of libraries
6. Java developer (wondering what a standard looks like, just kidding. As an intermediate-advanced Java developer, the book is very interesting though.)
7. developer who wants insight into currentsoftware architecture
Otherwise, the book is still a useful guide to help you grow as a developer if you even browse it sporadically, and unlike many programming books, it will not be obsolete in a year. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2009.

Hundreds of programming languages are in use today—scripting languages for Internet commerce, user interface programming tools, spreadsheet macros, page format specification languages, and many others. Designing a programming language is a metaprogramming activity that bears certain similarities to programming in a regular language, with clarity and simplicity even more important than in ordinary programming. This comprehensive text uses a simple and concise framework to teach key ideas in programming language design and implementation. The book's unique approach is based on a family of syntactically simple pedagogical languages that allow students to explore programming language concepts systematically. It takes as its premise and starting point the idea that when language behaviors become incredibly complex, the description of the behaviors must be incredibly simple.

The book presents a set of tools (a mathematical metalanguage, abstract syntax, operational and denotational semantics) and uses it to explore a comprehensive set of programming language design dimensions, including dynamic semantics (naming, state, control, data), static semantics (types, type reconstruction, polymporphism, effects), and pragmatics (compilation, garbage collection). The many examples and exercises offer students opportunities to apply the foundational ideas explained in the text. Specialized topics and code that implements many of the algorithms and compilation methods in the book can be found on the book's Web site, along with such additional material as a section on concurrency and proofs of the theorems in the text. The book is suitable as a text for an introductory graduate or advanced undergraduate programming languages course; it can also serve as a reference for researchers and practitioners. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

An outstanding treatment of programming language theory
The book is about various concepts encountered in various kinds of programming languages: denotational and operational (BOS/SOS) semantics, issues of state and control, type systems, modules, modeling effects and compilation.
Every concept is introduced by defining the semantics of a language that has this concept and exploring the design dimensions and issues of this concept and language.
Concepts are gradually accumulated, and by the time you reach the chapter on modules you've got a CBV language with records, mutable state, polymorphic algebraic data types, a System F type system with type inference and a hint ofdependent types, abstract data types and first-class dynamically loadable modules.

The tools used for description are of course the good old denotational and operational semantics and typing judgements and derivation trees; but each element of those is clearly and succintly described in text; it happens to me all the time that I am reading a type reconstruction algorithm and wondering, "why does this rule have that restriction?" and it immediately turns out that in the next paragraph, the authors focus attention on why this rule has that restriction; just like if they were reading my thoughts.
That's why this book feels very comfortable to me: I am absolutely sure that I won't encounter a point where I am lost and buried under the notation; but there is also not a single boring moment.

I've been interested in functional programming and PL theory for 2-3 years already, and here's a brief list of the *new* things that I have learned, at least:
- What do SOS and BOS mean, and why one should care, and what properties a SOS might posess (confluence and normalization, for instance)
- How many features of languages can be defined in terms of simply desugaring, and how in some cases they can't
- How one might use monadic style in the semantics metalanguageto greatly simplify the semantic rules for monadic concepts like state, control and error handling (the authors mention the word "monad" only once, but they use return- and bind-like operators in their semantics)
- How powerful records are, and of what use are operators like "conceal"
- What use is subtyping outside of OOP
- How does one define CPS-style semantics and how such a style allows to add state, control and errors with minimal changes
- How small yet powerful an OOP language core can be
- How algebraic datatypes can be very useful even in a language without static typing
- How pattern matching can be desugared into CPS-style deconstructors
- How many caveats are there in defining typing rules, and how a small change in them can lead to very big changes in language expressiveness
- How HM type inference actually works
- Why purity is important for certain polymorphism issues
- What let-polymorphism means
- What effect systems are
- How effect reconstruction works and how it is different from type reconstruction in nature
- How effect inference can prove the external purity of certain internally impure programs
That's where I finished my reading for now. The remaining looks even more intriguing; for example, I don't (yet) know how functional languages are compiled and how register allocation is done.

I'm afraid to sound like a salesman, but this is absolutely the best-written technical book I have ever seen in my life, and probably the most influential one for me, excluding maybe SICP.

Fantastic book!
Really wonderful book, well-written, easy to read, covers many topics.Very formal and yet so readable.All code within the book is written in s-exps syntax, and the book covers topics such as type inference, monads etc.Need I say more? :-)

well worth the price
If you want to pursue PL in any detail, you might as well buy this book now because very soon most schools are going to start using it/recommending it as a text in grad-level intro PL courses. I used Winskell in grad school and had forgotten most of it. This book is definitely more accessible and covers a lot more material and is much more up-to-date with current research. It's a lot of fun to read and I predict its going to become *the* book in its field very shortly.

A recommendend read
MIT Press's massive new tome is excellently researched, thorough and a must-have for your deskside bookcase. Just make sure the shelf is sturdy enough for its 1,322 pages: This is not a book to carry in your hand luggage for your next airplane trip....

You can read my full review at blog.zeichick.org ... Read more

Product Description
The Element of Language Curriculum examines language teaching in detail from a systematic curriculum development perspective. The text presents a comprehensive but practical overview of the different phases and activities involved in developing and implementing a sound rational and effective language program. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Great reference for a new couese curriculum
If you are interested in making your own course, this book will help you a lot with a variety of categories in which
you can find many more sub-elements to be taken into account.
This is great for you to have a whole view of the program with diverse aspects to it.(closer to theoritical base)

useful and practical guide book for curriculum evaluation
This book is quite useful for writing researcher paper on language curriculum or program evaluation.It is academically valuable, but it is also easily understandable for everyone because the language is notdiffcult at all. It has good literature review of related topics.It alsoincludes real examples of some ESL programs in the US.This books helpedme a lot to write a research paper on a langauge course evaluation.It isgood for individual use as well as a textbook for any graduate courese ofcurriculum development or evaluation. Plus, the layout of this book ispretty pleasant. ... Read more

Product Description

The Turkic languages are spoken today in a vast geographical area from the Balkans to the Arctic Ocean and from South Iran to China. There are currently twenty languages in the group, the most important being Turkish.

This is the first reference book to bring together detailed discussions of the historical development and specialized linguistic structures and features of this vast language family. Each chapter contains modern linguistic analysis with traditional historical linguistics, allowing for easy typological comparison of the language.

Customer Reviews (1)

Deserves to be the standard reference in English for anyone interested in this language family
This book is like a big piece of candy for anyone interested in the Turkic languages. Routledge's Language Family Descriptions series offers single-chapter summaries of the grammars and lexicons of the major members of a family, and their Turkic volume published in 1998 continues the tradition with strong contributions from the leading Turkologists of our time.

There are six chapters on the family as a whole: The Speakers of Turkic Languages (Hendrik Boeschoten), The Turkic Peoples: A Historical Sketch (Peter B. Golden), The Structure of Turkic (Lars Johanson), The Reconstruction of Proto-Turkic and the Genetic Question (Andras Rona-Tas), The History of Turkic (Lars Johanson) and Turkic Writing SYstems (Andras Rona-Tas). The contributions of Johanson and Andras-Rona Tas are extremely helpful for understanding the isoglosses which divide the Turkic family into its various subfamilies, and they give a good overview of the controversies on the reconstruction of proto-languages.

Then there are single chapters on each language or, in a few cases, collections of unstandardized dialects. These are Old Turkic (Marcel Erdal), Middle Kipchak (Arpad Berta), Chaghatay (Hendrik Boeschoten and Marc Vandamme), Ottoman Turkish (Celia Kerslake), Turkish (Eva A. Csato and Lars Johanson), Turkish dialects (Bernt Brendemoen), Azerbaijanian (Claus Schonig), Turkmen (Schonig), Turkic languages of Iran (Gerhard Doerfer), Tatar and Bashkir (Berta), West Kipchak languages (Berta), Kazakh and Karakalpak (Mark Kirchner), Nogay (Eva A. Csato and Birsel Karakoc), Kirghiz (Kirchner), Uzbek (Boeschoten), Uyghur (Reinhard F. Hahn), Yellow Uyghur and Salar (Hahn), South Siberian Turkic (Schonig), Yakut (Marek Stachowski and Astrid Menz), and Chuvash (Larry Clark).

There's also a chapter on the Turkish language reform written by Bernt Brendemoen, though I feel that Geoffrey Lewis' The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success is the best popular introduction to the affair. I should also note that Marcel Erdal's presentation of Old Turkic is vastly expanded in his later monograph A Grammar of Old Turkic (Amsterdam: Brill, 2004).

My only complaint about this delightful reference is that a number of typos are present, especially in Arpad Berta's contribution on Tatar and Bashkir. These pose little problem for those with some previous experience with the Turkic languages, but may confuse many readers. Shame on Routledge for not correcting these even in the paperback reprint of 2006. Still, this is *the* contemporary introduction to the Turkic family in English, and I recommend it to all linguaphiles. ... Read more

Product Description
This simple and effective introduction to Korean will teach you everything you need to speak, understand, read, and write in Korean.This program assumes no background in the language, and it explains each new concept clearly with plenty of examples, making it ideal for beginners or anyone who wants a thorough review.Living Language Korean includes:

·A course book and six audio CDs
·Two unique sets of recordings, one for use with the book, and a second for use anywhere to review and reinforce
·Natural dialogues, clear grammar notes, vocabulary building, and key expressions
·Plenty of practice, both written and recorded
·Notes on culture, cuisine, history, geography, and more
·Real life “discovery” activities and internet resources
·An extensive two-way glossary ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Pimsleur, Assimil, Teach Yourself, or LIVING LANGUAGE?
As an experienced language learner, I can honestly say that the Living Language series is, by far, the best on the market. Specifically, the Living Language Ultimate series and Spoken World series offer an entertaining and effective approach toward language learning. I have found that this product succeeds where others seem to have failed. For example, the audio for the Assimil series is terrible, as the speakers talk at such a slow pace that there's a good chance you'll be waking up several hours later. The reading and writing aspects are other areas in which courses such as Teach Yourself and Pimsleur have dropped the ball. Pimsleur offers zero text and hence, is absolutely useless to anyone who is serious about learning the language. While Teach Yourself does offer text, the authors for some reason or another have decided that it would be better to use romanization. Living Language is the most complete course I have found as both the written content and the accompanying audio are excellent. Here, the authors have taken a sensible approach, using Hangeul with the aid of transliteration in the first few chapters, and then introducing the text in Hangeul. The conversations also arelively, natural, and above all, practical. You will find that every chapter is filled with content that is pertinent, useful and applicable to actual conversations. Unfortunately, for Rosetta Stone fans, you will not find sentences such as "the octopus is behind the library". My only complaint is that the course could be longer. I would also recommend supplementing the material with a dictionary and grammar workbook. Even so, the course is great. If I were to any one product, Pimsleur (trash), Teach Yourself, or Assimil (although the latter two are also excellent in their own right) I would recommend this one.

A Good "No Frills" Introduction Course
First, as an introduction, I am not an individual who picks up a book and latches onto a foreign language.I have not fluent in Korean (yet), but am working on improving my proficiency.I used this course to get my feet wet through informal study.I have used phrasebooks, Before You Land, and Rosetta Stone resources before but prefer the type of no-frills, no-nonsense instruction offered by this course.

Packet consists of 6 audio CDs and a book - all are user friendly and easy to understand.I especially like how the CDs are indexed with relatively short lessons when compared to other resources.Explaining further, if you want to review a lesson or a specific phrase, the sections are small enough to quickly fast-forward or rewind to the specific point on the CDs.The vocabulary building CD is great to keep in the car to brush up while commuting around town.

I highly recommend this for school and public libraries, and would recommend this to American students who would like a 101-style introduction to this beautiful but intimidating language.

Not expensive but not worth the money
I want to learn Korean in the order of reading-writing-speaking-listening. Most books appear to be aimed at the the person who will soon be traveling to Korea and needs expressions for finding a restaurant. This book focuses on grammar, which is exactly what I was looking for. As I progressed through it, though, I became increasingly disappointed. It is literally riddled with errors, some so obvious someone who knows nothing of Korean could still pick up. I mean dozens of errors, and they are more frequent as the book goes on. I'm on the last chapter, which I'll plow through, and then head to the Tuttle book.

I'm a civil engineer. When a design is at the 60% point, we submit the drawings to the client for review. The intent of the design is there, including important details, but is not buildable -- too many gaps. If the book didn't have errors, it would be at the 60% point -- not usuable but providng a good idea of what the final product should look like.

Don't waste your money.

Nice Recordings, Light on Grammar
It used to be that anyone learning Korean had to go on a treasure hunt to find learning materials.Now that Korea is emerging as a global economic player, learners of Korean are in the enviable position of having too many language learning choices.

Living Language products are sold as no-gimmick learning materials.There are no tricks, no cuteness, just you and the language.The new World Languages series features a fairly thin book and a set of six CDs.

First, the good.The CDs are excellent.The Korean speakers are clearly understandable and they speak at a pace that is easy for a non-native to follow but not so slow that they sound odd.Three of the CDs are meant to be used with the book, the other three are meant as refreshers that can be used without the book.

The book teaches the Korean script (Hangeul) immediately.This alone sets it apart from many of the major Korean language releases.Learning the Korean alphabet is easy and essential to full fluency.The first few lessons have Romanization but it disappears later in the book.

There is good emphasis on casual speech, a topic notably lacking is most Korean learning material.Most books confine themselves to -imnida and -saeyo endings.This book teaches casual speech fairly early, an excellent move.After all, making friends is an important part of language learning and who wants to talk to their friends the same way they would talk to their boss or grandmother?

The exercises are also good.The suggestion of starting a journal in Korean is a wonderful idea and has helped me greatly.Admittedly, my journal does not make for very gripping reading (mostly concerned with work, weather and what I bought today) due to a limited vocabulary, but it gives great practice in actually using Korean.And your beginner's mistakes will be a fun thing to laugh about with your Korean speaking friends once you become fluent.

Now for the not so good.The book is very light on the grammar.Irregular verbs are skimmed over and conjugation is not as well covered as I would have liked.I found myself constantly referring back to my other two Korean books, Beginner's Korean (Hippocrene Beginner's Series) and Elementary Korean (Tuttle Language Library) to find answers to very basic questions.

The vocabulary section is anemic.You are asked to make a Korean journal but they don't include the word for journal?Hmm.

So, it it worth the money?It depends on your finances.If you are on a budget, I would recommend one of the two books mentioned earlier.They are both good as stand-alone textbooks.If you have the money to spend, the recordings are well worth the price of the set.The culture notes included in the book are also good.It will make a worthy addition to your Korean language bookshelf and will supplement your other material.

I would NOT recommend purchasing this set as your lone Korean language learning material.The grammar and vocabulary sections are just too thin to be of much help to a beginner.
... Read more

Product Description
Patterns are a unique and productive way to attack problems that recur in everyday software designs. The design patterns and pattern languages presented in this book offer a glimpse into what makes great software designers great. The book also offers a rare look at the rationale behind solutions to problems.Amazon.com Review
Pattern Languages of Program Design is the first ofthree volumes of groundbreaking research on patterns, ranging fromsmaller-scale design patterns to larger patterns useful for softwarearchitecture and process engineering.Early chapters look atframeworks and components for engineering solutions to particulartypes of problems at a higher level, such as looking at patterns as"tools and materials" that can be used to solve problemseffectively.The guide also discusses how to use patterns withinterpreters and client-server systems.

Distributed processing is a difficult and exciting area of computing,and patterns presented in Pattern Languages of Program Designcan help solve some of the problems of scalability, concurrency, andtransaction management. These patterns include several businessobjects for managing transactions and accounts, as well as foroptimizing queries across distributed systems.

The middle section of this text applies patterns to the softwareengineering process itself and several papers (including oneintriguingly called "Caterpillar's Fate") show how thepattern movement can benefit software engineers and managers. Furthermaterial looks at the process of defining and implementingpatterns. (Discovering patterns is only a start; learning to reusethem effectively is another challenge.) Final chapters look atpatterns that manage state and events for real-time and behavioralsystems.

Although the first installment of Pattern Language of ProgramDesign offers a decidedly mixed bag of essays, it is particularlystrong on distributed systems and provides a strong overview of somecentral thinking on pattern research, which is stillrelevant. --Richard Dragan ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Correction Please
Well, suffice it to say the one review here, aside from having nothing to say, could not be farther from the truth. I still open this book all the time. The whole series of PLoP books are immensely useful texts. To tell the truth, these compilation books of papers are, if they are good, in their own realm, far above what you will get from one author. Too much of the computer press turns out the 'work' of exhausted people who are clearly trying to spread a couple ideas across a whole book. Even the Gang of Four book is really a compilation of sorts.

Anyway, this book has many good things in it. Anyone who is interested in Patterns should have the whole series of PLoP books.

The very beginning of Patterns movement
This book is really reserved for pattern's fans, because material inside is essentially focused on processes patterns, and design materials are expressed in a textual way. Anyway, some ideas are good to be kept aside,but amount of such ideas don't justify the book size. ... Read more

Product Description
Tasks and Communicating in Language Classrooms is a significant new work in the area of classroom communication. This text takes a principled approach to how one can take the basic question-and-answer paradigm found in many, if not most, language textbooks and reformulate it into interactive tasks that place communication in the hands of the student-learners.This text is practical in terms of task development and task-based test design and development, and simultaneously well-grounded in theory and research. Continuing in the tradition of bringing theory, research, and practice together into one volume, Lee's work is a welcome addition to the McGraw-Hill Second Language Professional Series. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Average book with a sub-par printing.
For a book that costs 54 dollars, I don't feel bad when I say that it's not in its favor to have pages that look like they were copied with a really bad coping machine. On the other hand, the content is OK, it's average, I think McGrawHill has a variety of different books centered around the same theme and Lee is the series editor ("Directions in Second Language Learning"). The book is concise and the chapters are short, but the only real reason you would want this book over the others is because it's on the syllabus.

Short version: Horrible printing, average content.

Tasks and Communicating in Language Classrooms
This review is written by a native Spanish teacher teaching High SchoolSpanish in New Jersey.I enjoyed reading this book because it explains ina very comprehensible way what a task is, what makestask- based teachingdifferent and more productive than the audiolingual method in the incrementof oral production in second language learners.The book mainlyconcentrates on tasks for oral production, on how to create tasks, and howto implement and test them. The book teaches how to change from theteacher-student: question - answer paradigm to the student-student question- answer paradigm. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know aboutthe creation of tasks,and their implementation and tests in second languagesettings.The book is also good for those who need to research informationfor further studies on tasks because it contains a large bibliography withreference to other books related to tasks with a brief summary of theircontents. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Machine Language For Beginners
Richard Mansfield has written so many articles in Compute! on the subject of machien language he could have esaily writen a 9000 page book. What he did write was a very good overview of the basics of Machine Language.
The book starts of with an introduction to how computers work, what Binary and Hex are, and how they relate to programing. All the basics are covred with enough detail for a beginer to understand what they are doing.
Next the subject of Monitors, and Aseblers is discussed. Followed by chapters on the instruction set, and a very usfull chapter on basic comands equivelnet ML instructions.
If you know your way around a computer you will definatly have a good understanding of the fundamentls and be able to code your own ML programs with this book.
On the down side Mansfield chose not to cover the BCC and BCS branch instructions, as well as anything other than the most fundamental math.BIT was also hardly mentioned.
This is definatly a good intudction to 6502 Machine Language, but if you realy want to master Ml you'll need more books. ... Read more

Product Description
Patterns remain one of the most important new technologies contributing to software engineering, system design, and development.All indications are that patterns will continue to grow in significance for years to come as more and more developers have come to rely on design patterns to help them deliver reusable and cost effective applications in a more timely fashion.This volume is a collection of the current best practices and trends in the patterns community. The patterns contained in this book provide effective, tested, and proven software design solutions for developers in all domains, institutions, and organizations. The third in a series of books documenting patterns for professional software developers, this volume continues the tradition of informational excellence established by the first two volumes. Pattern Languages of Program Design 3 is unique from the previous two volumes in that it includes international submissions, having gathered the best papers from both Plop '96 and EuroPLoP '96.A wide range of pattern-related topics are covered, and the patterns are arranged by topic so software engineers can easily select the patterns of greatest relevance to their needs and application domains.This book goes beyond teaching software engineers that design patterns are powerful tools to impart understanding -- it shows you where and when patterns are best applied.Amazon.com Review
The third book in a series, Pattern Languages of ProgramDesign 3 discusses how to catalog software patterns, which arereusable, higher-order designs. This volume presents over two dozenwhite papers on newly "discovered" patterns within a widevariety of contexts. The editors have grouped these patterns by topicso you can choose what interests you. Each pattern profile features ashort introduction to show you what each pattern might be good for.

"General purpose" design patterns include the Null Object,the Manager, and the Product Trader patterns, and another sectionimproves on the Visitor pattern. These patterns allow classes toborrow the methods of other classes without using inheritance. Some ofthe most challenging patterns in this book are good for distributedprocessing, including Acceptor and Connector and ObjectRecovery. Basic research in object-oriented design (OOD) is apparentin the Serializer pattern, which implements persistence for objects,another unusually difficult aspect of object design to getright. Another useful section introduces "domain specific"patterns--or patterns that solve particular real-world problems--withseveral patterns for transportation systems and fire alarms.

Thebook closes with more esoteric explorations of patterns fordevelopers, including patterns for effectively designing in teams andusing software testing patterns. Judging from the rich selection ofthe ordinary and the bizarre, there seems to be no end in sight forthe business of discovering patterns. For those interested inexpanding their collection of patterns, this volume offers afascinating array of new specimens. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Many nuggets of software development knowledge, however you need some knowledge of design patterns to understand it
While patterns are an inherent part of the human experience, using them in software development is a recent phenomenon. The seminal event was the publication of the book, "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software", by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. A Group so well-known that they are commonly referred to as the "Gang of Four," or GoF for short.
A design pattern is a metamodel for a solution. However, being a solution to a set of conditions common to many different problems, design patterns are very hard to learn. Even the GoF admit this in the preface of their book. "Don't worry if you don't understand this book completely on the first reading. We didn't understand it all on the first writing!" There are two fundamental reasons for this. The first is that the identification of a design pattern requires that one recognize a common abstraction among a set of abstractions. There is principle about great mathematicians that applies here. " The great mathematicians find analogies among analogies." The second is that our brains are very efficient at finding patterns. Unfortunately, those found are often ones already cataloged. Presented with a partial pattern, our minds automatically do a great deal of curve fitting to create a complete image matching one already known. Therefore, it is all too easy to find a pattern that we are familiar with, rather than the one that is present. Making the subject even more complex is that patterns are not distinctive entities. Some are constructed from other patterns, others are instances of a specific pattern, and many patterns share common characteristics. Being of recent vintage, there is no well-defined language available to describe patterns. Furthermore, not all patterns currently in use have been explicitly described.
As the name implies, the book being reviewed here is another volume in a series of collected works. In this case, the components are the best papers from PloP '96 and EuroPloP '96. They are of course of the highest quality, which means that intensive study is a precondition to understanding the book. Many new patterns are described, although at times one gets the impression that the word pattern is being overused. Without clear guidelines as yet for the precise use of the word in this context, this is expected. Very few of the patterns are described at the computer-code level, which is very good. Computer code, even when it is kept generic, eliminates some of the abstract qualities of what a pattern is designed to do. The pattern descriptions are given in the generic form: Intent, Motivation, Applicability, Structure, Participants, Collaborations, Known Uses, and Related Patterns.
This format allows for an understanding of all facets of the pattern, from the why of creation to how it fits into the dictionary of known patterns. The range of problems solved by these patterns is substantial. Some sample patterns are: Null Object, Bureaucracy, Bodyguard, Serializer, and the Selfish Class. In the final chapter, patterns on Patterns, an additional, important step up the metalevel hierarchy is taken. A definition and description language are described, although sentences like, "Patterns for making patterns Understandable contains patterns that capture techniques for making your patterns and pattern languages easier to read understand, and apply," require a great deal of thought. Patterns provide a series of levels of design structures that expedite the reuse of solutions, with code reuse being a direct consequence.
As more patterns are discovered and refined, and the description language is formalized, they will become the "gold standard" of software development. Learning what they are and how of implement them will become a highly valued skill. There are many nuggets to be mined from this book. However, be prepared to go slow and occasionally be discouraged.

Published in Journal of Object-Oriented Programming, reprinted with permission

Enjoyable book for the friends of software patterns
This book has quite some prerequisites for its potential readers. You should have a working knowledge of the patterns of the too basic books ("Design Patterns" by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides and "Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture" by Frank Buschmann, Regine Meunier, Hans Rohnert, Peter Sommerlad, Michael Stal). It is helpful to have the too previous conference books as a reference nearby. Yes and you have to cope with C++ (when did you use it last time) and Smalltalk.

If you are happy with this, you get rewarded by a rich set of ideas and insights. The book just draws you in. This is a conference book by many authors. But due to their shepherd and writers workshop efforts the book nearly reads like being written by one author/author team. The level is excellent. Reading this book is a nice way to spend your time.

A Lot of good stuff
When looking at the PLOPD serie, it become obvious that material become more and more mature. We'll find in this book good design patterns we can directly apply in our everyday work. Yo will probably found that allpatterns are not usefull, but only a subset, but it's however an enoughreason to buy this book. ... Read more