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Programming Language Explorations

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Programming Language Explorations is a tour of several modern programming languages in use today. The book teaches fundamental language concepts using a language-by-language approach. As each language is presented, the authors introduce new concepts as they appear, and revisit familiar ones, comparing their implementation with those from languages seen in prior chapters. The goal is to present and explain common theoretical concepts of language design and usage, illustrated in the context of practical language overviews.

Twelve languages have been carefully chosen to illustrate a wide range of programming styles and paradigms. The book introduces each language with a common trio of example programs, and continues with a brief tour of its basic elements, type system, functional forms, scoping rules, concurrency patterns, and sometimes, metaprogramming facilities.

Each language chapter ends with a summary, pointers to open source projects, references to materials for further study, and a collection of exercises, designed as further explorations. Following the twelve featured language chapters, the authors provide a brief tour of over two dozen additional languages, and a summary chapter bringing together many of the questions explored throughout the text.

Targeted to both professionals and advanced college undergraduates looking to expand the range of languages and programming patterns they can apply in their work and studies, the book pays attention to modern programming practice, covers cutting-edge languages and patterns, and provides many runnable examples, all of which can be found in an online GitHub repository. The exploration style places this book between a tutorial and a reference, with a focus on the concepts and practices underlying programming language design and usage. Instructors looking for material to supplement a programming languages or software engineering course may find the approach unconventional, but hopefully, a lot more fun.

362 pages, Paperback

Published September 20, 2016

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About the author

Ray Toal

3 books

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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
6 reviews
April 27, 2022
It is 7:18am, I've just finished the last 5 pages of a book and am ready to write some review. I definitely enjoyed the reading process. This book helped me to get more familiar with functional languages and forced me to try them out, which was a pleasant experience, as well as gave an insight into some of the topics of language design. It greatly aids one to enrich one's knowledge of how languages are actually designed, answering questions of why certain design decisions have been made. The book left me with a realization of how rich the world of programming languages is and how little I know about them. I'm so glad to have stumbled upon it. 5 stars, worth reading, my huge respect to authors. Thank you!
Profile Image for Łukasz Słonina.
124 reviews25 followers
March 11, 2018
Quick journey through different programming languages. Presents selected features of each language with set of excercises.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews

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