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From this review: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2017/book-review-essentials-of-programming-languages-by-d-friedman-and-m-wand/ http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2017/

• abecedarius 9y ago
  I did self-study it. I agree that just reading probably won't teach you much -- you need to program your way through the exercises, at least many of them. Getting stuck on a problem could make things difficult on your own and maybe rob you of momentum. This is a hitch I run into with math books a lot more than programming books, personally, but now that you bring it up this may be an issue I should've thought of. (Like him I also worked through SICP this way.)
  • mangodrunk 9y ago
    Good to know. Could you say how long it took you to go through EOPL? Would you recommend another book on the topic for self-study? I've been hesitant at starting these books because I was thinking too that without the exercises, it would be a lot less useful, and so it would be a bigger time/effort commitment than I want to get into.
    • abecedarius 9y ago
      Here's one of the newer ones I mentioned, which I haven't read but seems well regarded: http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/ http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/ EoPL took about as much work as a good college class, minus the sitting-in-lectures-and-tests part. Some parts aren't depended on later, like the OO chapter IIRC, so they're up to whether you're interested.
• plinkplonk 9y ago
  I used it (1st edition) for self study.just a datapoint.