Designed to provide readers with a broad and deep understanding of the major issues in both design and implementation of modern programming languages and a basic introduction to the underlying theoretical models on which these languages are based. The emphasis throughout is on fundamental concepts--readers learn important ideas, not minor language differences.
There's really very little to recommend this book. About two hundred better texts exist on this topic, some of them with almost indistinguishable titles. I give it a second star only because the bold black spine looks striking among the largely-garish bottom-feeders of my "uninspiring computer science" shelves, here taking a page from Grading the Flags.