by Daniel P. Friedman, Mitchell Wand Hardcover: 416 pages Publisher: The MIT Press; 3 edition (April 30, 2008) ISBN-10: 0262062798 ISBN-13: 978-0262062794 This book provides students with a deep, working understanding of the essential concepts of programming languages. Most of these essentials relate to the semantics, or meaning, of program elements, and the text uses interpreters (short programs that directly analyze an abstract representation of the program text) to express the semantics of many essential language elements in a way that is both clear and executable.