What do you think?
Rate this book
Practical Foundations for Programming Languages
Ebook is freely available on the author site:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/pfpl/2nded...
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/pfpl/2nded...
582 pages, ebook
First published January 30, 2012
38 people are currently reading
421 people want to read
About the author
Robert Harper
41 books24 followersRobert Harper is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.
Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 28, 2019
While not a bad book, this should not be a first book on type theory and programming languages.
Robert Harper's syntax is terse to put it kindly and his lack of concrete examples can make an already abstract topic unapproachable. Additionally, he uses notation used and known only to him. This notation is consistent throughout his book but differs greatly from, e.g., Pierce's Types and Programming Languages which follows existing literature much more closely.
This approach I think works well when you have already seen the material before and would like some insight into some subtleties of the theory (for example, describing a context as a set is not sufficient in all cases).
Robert Harper's syntax is terse to put it kindly and his lack of concrete examples can make an already abstract topic unapproachable. Additionally, he uses notation used and known only to him. This notation is consistent throughout his book but differs greatly from, e.g., Pierce's Types and Programming Languages which follows existing literature much more closely.
This approach I think works well when you have already seen the material before and would like some insight into some subtleties of the theory (for example, describing a context as a set is not sufficient in all cases).
May 28, 2019
Learn a ton reading this book. It starts off fairly easy with the level of abstraction picking up slowly from there. Lots of ground is covered by this book. I found so many answers to questions about programming languages and type theory.
May 15, 2019
Though not my first choice of book it still teach me a lot about foundations of programming language
December 2, 2024
Read this as part of Bob's class, and I enjoy his lectures better than the book.
March 28, 2024
The book contains a lot of great stuff but is also a bit tedious and challenging to grasp. It's the sort of book that demands revisiting the basics; it's easy to forget earlier material, leading to confusion when advanced concepts build upon earlier notations. I anticipate rereading it someday.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews