A nice book I have found on the topic of virtual machines as they relate to programming languages is http://www.amazon.com/Compiler-Design-Machines-Reinhard-Wil

A nice book I have found on the topic of virtual machines as they relate to programming languages is http://www.amazon.com/Compiler-Design-Machines-Reinhard-Wilhelm/dp/3642149081 http://www.amazon.com/Compiler-Design-Machines-Reinhard-Wilh.... It is a pretty good book although the focus is less on emulating actual hardware and more on designing and implementing custom virtual machines as compilation targets for imperative, functional, and logic languages. I kinda wish there were more meetups that focused on this kind of stuff instead of the latest and greatest frameworks. This kind of fundamental theory is applicable in any kind of application and framework setting.