Friday, September 30, 2011

Practical Foundations for Programming Languages [Working Draft] free eBook - Think "586 pages of if I wanted to create a programming language I'd want to read this book..." or "It's making my brain hurt... ouch.. ouCH... OUCH!"

Robert Harper

Practical Foundations for Programming Languages. Working Draft, 2010.

Here's a clip from the Preface;

This is a working draft of a book on the foundations of programming languages. The central organizing principle of the book is that programming language features may be seen as manifestations of an underlying type structure that governs its syntax and semantics. The emphasis, therefore, is on the concept of type, which codifies and organizes the computational universe in much the same way that the concept of set may be seen as an organizing principle for the mathematical universe. The purpose of this book is to explain this remark.

Being in many ways a consolidation of many ideas from the literature on programming languages, I make no attempt to give an exhaustive account of the history or sources of many of the ideas. The notes at the end of each chapter provide some guidance for further reading and background, but are not intended as a complete guide to the literature. For further background please see ...

An overview of the PDF;

SNAGHTML57ecf2d

Here's another page thumbnail snip to give you a feel for the density of the content (i.e. this is not your screenshot, graphic heavy kind of book);

SNAGHTML5804095

So not your light reading, but also not the usual fair of ebook either.

(via The Morning Brew - The Morning Brew #949 -> Tatworth - Free Programming Book - Practical Foundations for Programming Languages)

No comments: