It looks interesting, but there is something about the copy that puts me off. Maybe it's the way it focuses on what it's not, i don't know it feels kind of scamy, like one of those shopping channel ads.
I had the exact same feeling. Couldn't put my finger on it at first. The book itself interests me, but something about the copy made it seem "too good to be true" and as you said a bit scamy and off-putting.
It may have changed in the past 31 minutes since you posted, but currently the price is in the copy directly above the buy button. Still reads as scammy, though.
This pops up from time to time on Hacker News. I got the book and went through it, but couldn't go beyond the basics and found myself in a state of limbo. I would love to hear from other people about their experience with the book and whether they continued beyond what this book has to offer.
The book is made by the creator of tinyrb (https://github.com/macournoyer/tinyrb). I've never read it, so I don't know whether it's any good, but I'm sure it's not a scam.
Implementing a programming language is a pretty difficult but rewarding task. It's become a lot easier these days now that there are giant runtimes you can target (JVM, CLR and so on). I would encourage anyone who is interested to give it a shot, and to find a good book or course to do so. (That book from Brown dmunoz posted looks excellent) And once you've done that, try writing your own runtime too (garbage collector/virtual machine or native compiler). It will teach you a lot about the tools you use every day.
The book has tons of code listings that make up the majority of the pages.
It used to be 53 pages, but is now somewhere over 100 pages, according the new updated site. The original's code listings are in Ruby; I can't help but wonder if he just redid them in Java to make the book longer. Seriously. And no, I'm not picking on Java.
I purchased this about a year ago, so I will give any potential buyers a fair warning, if you don't know ruby, this book is very hard to follow. All of the examples are in ruby and no pseudo code is provided.
If you have the stomach for it, find a used copy of the "dragon book" [1]. I have the red one.
LLVM is a modern "compiler infrastructure" project. It's textual intermediate language is relatively easy to write. If you can write a program that accepts user input, and generates LLVM IR, then you've got a compiler of sorts.
Those aren't "books in a similar vein", those are the things that this book is (as far as I can tell) aimed to disrupt.
It's like this thing is selling an ATM, and the parent comment is asking "well, I live in Nicaragua, is there an ATM there?" and your answer is "there is an ATM in Nicaragua, it is called a bank."
The Dragon Book is the reason more people don't write compilers. It's old and thorough and formal and really feels like you were handed an "Installing Your Model HJ-3660PF Nuclear Hydraulic Reactor" manual, more than an approachable guide. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, if you're forced through it for a class--you'll learn more, and what you learn will have a more stable foundation--but it's a shame for people who are just curious, and would learn something from a friendlier presentation where the more formal approach would lose them.
Writing a compiler is pretty fundamental to being able to form an understanding of platform semantics as separate from language syntax. It's something everyone can do--but it's treated so formally that it feels like one of those weird advanced-level things only to be attempted after you've learned everything else, like creating your own magic spells in D&D. If it felt more like some "Create Potion"-level magic, maybe more people would have tried it, and figured out that there's really no magic going on at all. :)
I actually skipped the course, but grabbed my used copy from the old Powell's Tech before it closed, as well as the O'Reilly Flex and Bison book. It felt like I had the nuclear reactor manual! I also got really into writing interpreters, mainly in Ruby, after reading probably too many ICFP papers on the subject (and even shipped one to solve an ad targeting problem.)
I always try to dive headlong into literature for concepts like this, knowing I won't understand everything right away. Implementing the concepts with my tools of choice has always been a great way to prove my understanding, and push myself.
It's an excellent free undergraduate-level PL textbook that covers a lot of ground and is informed by both research and practice. There's a 2nd edition linked from there as well.
Another page with "few simple tricks to create programming language". Looks really fake, regardless of it being real or not.
Putting bad marketing aside, are there currently areas which would require another programming language, that would provide something current languages do not provide, or make it so much better that the change would be rational?
No need to be so aggressive, but to answer your question:
1. Yes, there are probably a lot of areas that need new
programming languages or improvements of the current
programming languages, everything is quite far from
"perfect" at the moment (and it will probably always
be). There's still a huge amount of research going
in this direction.
2. Learning. Should you ever be stopped from learning
something new by the fact that something similar
already exists? Probably not. This is just business
thinking utter bullshit.
3. This "resource" was the starting point before few
quite young popular programming languages. I haven't
read it myself but it must be something good to learn
from it judging by the outcome. Show some respect.
I have no idea if this book being offered in this posting is good or not. Echoing some of the comments in this thread, here are some alternative resources.
The following book [0] popped up on reddit [1] the other day. I'm not sure how it compares, but it looks like a decent option. Surely better than the suggestion in this thread to "get the dragon book" which I feel is too obtuse of a recommendation.
My favourite free resource in this area is Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation [2], which has video lectures [3] from the online offering last year. Udacity also has a programming languages course in the vein of building a web browser.
There were also two interesting videos from PyCon USA 2013, All-Singing All-Dancing Python Bytecode [4], and So you want to write an interpreter? [5].
Some of the above are not precisely for creating your own programming languages, but they are great resource in the general area.
If I've got the story straight, this was the inspiration for Coffeescript. If you have the itch, but don't have forty dollars, you should check out the LLVM kaleidoscope tutorial [1] or read the LLVM manual and then check out my Ruby-LLVM project [2].
I haven't read this book of Marc's, but his Owning Rails course is excellent. It's definitely not for beginners, but is great if you're at least intermediate in Rails.
In the course he walks you through how to make a simple clone of the Rails framework. Once you've done that, digging into the Rails source isn't so intimidating.
