PLT is an interdisciplinary field and as such needs a study of various logical/mathematical/language areas. Even wikipedia is pretty bad at explaining what it i

PLT is an interdisciplinary field and as such needs a study of various logical/mathematical/language areas. Even wikipedia is pretty bad at explaining what it is - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_theory. The research community has failed the "ordinary" interested programmer wanting to learn PLT by not producing an overview/top-down book which brings together the various strands of needed knowledge into a coherent whole. Pierce/Harper/etc's books are simply overwhelming for a beginner without the requisite background knowledge. PLT approaches the idea of Computation from a formal system (i.e. language) pov and that is what needs to be communicated with the needed logical/mathematical knowledge inline. I have found the following useful in my study of PLT; Formal Syntax and Semantics of Programming Languages: A Laboratory Based Approach by Ken Slonneger and Barry Kurtz - https://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~slonnegr/ https://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~slonnegr/ and https://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~slonnegr/plf/Book/ https://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~slonnegr/plf/Book/ Understanding Formal Methods by Jean-Francois Monin.