I too was disappointed by that book. While conveying anything substantial about a language in that little space is quite difficult, I was underwhelmed by his ov

I too was disappointed by that book. While conveying anything substantial about a language in that little space is quite difficult, I was underwhelmed by his overviews of Prolog, Haskell, and Erlang (each of which I have some experience in), and suspect the other treatments are equally lacking. It also annoyed me how he characterized the language in the first few pages ("Scala is Frankenstein's monster!" or something like that) and then pushed the metaphor for the rest of the section. You may be better served by _Essentials of Programming Languages_ (http://eopl3.com/ http://eopl3.com/), _Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming_ (http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html), or _Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation_ (http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/ http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/) - also knows as EoPL, CTM, and PLAI, respectively. It really helps to cover several styles of language with interpreters in one common language, to avoid getting hung up on syntax and other surface details. Anyone whose entire impression of Lisp / Python / Erlang / K consists of bitching about parenthesis / significant whitespace / "ugly syntax" / "unreadable noise" has cheated themselves.