Editorial Review:
Concepts in Programming Languages elucidates the central concepts used in modern programming languages, such as functions, types, memory management, and control. The book is unique in its comprehensive presentation and comparison of major object-oriented programming languages. Separate chapters examine the history of objects, Simula and Smalltalk, and the prominent languages C++ and Java. The author presents foundational topics, such as lambda calculus and denotational semantics, in an easy-to-read, informal style, focusing on the main insights provided by these theories. Advanced topics include concurrency, concurrent object-oriented programming, program components, and inter-language interoperability. A chapter on logic programming illustrates the importance of specialized programming methods for certain kinds of problems.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
Good introduction to the subject  2007-06-18
I can't speak to John Mitchell's skill as a lecturer, but some of the complaints here seem to betray a misunderstanding of the purpose of the book: to serve as an introduction to programming language theory, such as can be found in Mitchell's other book *Foundations for Programming Languages*. Mitchell is taking you *out of* the marketable skills zone and into abstract computer science, and he's being pretty nice about it -- the book contains friendly precises of topics like lambda calculus and denotational semantics, which make up the formal core of programming languages. What you will learn has applications in all popular programming languages, even if it's not spelled out in the text.
ML was a good choice as an example language, because it includes many of the features a programming language might have (being both imperative and functional), and furthermore is a serious research language on account of its well-understood semantics and type system. Focusing on it to explain core concepts was not a mistake. Mitchell knows how to do it the other way, too: explanations of the basic elements of object-orientation are parceled out over several notable OO languages, providing a way to compare and contrast how the major OO concepts can be implemented. (I didn't find the final chapter, Apt's summary of Prolog, as helpful: the declarative paradigm is too far removed from what was developed in the rest of the book.)
On account of its relatively gentle explanations and the importance of its concepts for all aspects of CS, this would be a good book for a relative beginner in CS to pick up (provided they can comprehend more than just code). But if you find it too repellent, you're probably not going to be much happier with more advanced treatments: its character just reflects the nature of the field.
Good Review Book, Bad Intro Book  2007-01-04
It's a good review book if you know your material and just need a quick refresh or need the same concept explained differently. However, this book will intimidate you if you're new to computer science. An example would be in Chapter 1, the words "stack memory management and recursive functions or procedures" were thrown at the readers without any explanation.
I think I had a worse textbook once, ten years ago  2005-12-19
The excessive reliance on ML and poor language skills exhibited are well covered in the other reviews. I'd just like to add that Mitchell has a terrible habit of explaining things out of order (for instance, activation records are explained on page 165, but you are expected to know them on page 148), and his "This is beyond the scope of this book." handwaving makes many of the explanations completely incoherent.
I have never sold back a textbook before, but I'm taking this back to the bookstore right after my final, and then I'll get a real Comparative Programming Languages textbook.
Bordering on incoherent 2005-10-10
As a grdauate student, I feel compelled to write honestly about this book in the hopes that what I'm writing might influence some teacher's decision in the future. Granted, the topic area this book is covering isn't trivial, but in the light of its complex nature it is even more paramount that someone attempting to explain it to those who don't understand it be well-versed in, frankly, English. This book is quite possibly the worst textbook I have ever encountered. The writing is atrocious, the "flow" is like mud, and the explanations make even things that could be simple, dreadfully complex. Avoid it like the plague, there are a lot better options.
Missing the point 2004-08-09
While I cannot speak to the quality of Mitchell's course, having only read his book, the earlier criticisms of his use of ML in the book are missing the point of a programming languages class. It's not meant to teach you a random sampling of the 2500+ computer languages that are out there. The idea is to learn about the fundamental paradigms of programming, with a focus on the functional and logical approaches since students are generally already familiar with imperative and object-oriented programming.
ML is one of several good choices for illustrating functional programming, and is actually one of the more popular functional languages (especially the OCaML dialect.) There are many well written books and tutorials on the ML family of languages freely available on the web if you need more examples or detail than he provides in this text. However, the point isn't to learn ML, but rather that once you understand functional programming in any language, you can take advantage of its power, not only in languages like perl and python which offer some limited but nice functional features like map and anonymous functions, but also in imperative languages like C via function pointers and callback techniques.
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