HN Books @HNBooksMonth

Robert Harper has a great introductory(1) book on the matter

You should have a reasonably complete treatment of what you are looking for by the time you reach the chapter on PCF.

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Foundations-Programming-Lang...

1: I call it "introductory" because many of the relevant proofs are left as an exercise to the reader. But truthfully, people I've spoken to with a direct influence on the book have mentioned many a time that harper excludes them because he expects you to know them or be able to figure them...

Another excellent and up-to-date resource is Practical Foundations for Programming Languages by Robert Harper.

http://amzn.com/1107029570

Harper hosts an online version of this book: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/plbook/book.pdf.

⬐ carterschonwald

I remember reading a draft of it in high school, and finding a typo, in 2004 I think? Led to my first email interaction with Bob, 'twas my first real correspondence with a professional computer scientist! It led to some very very fun reading PLT reading recommendations that kept me busy! :)

That said, this master tome is not light reading, but I really should take a week this fall to work through it!

⬐ inexhaling

590 pages in 1.66 MB, that's already a reliable indicator for an intense reading experience...

⬐ AndrewO

Looks interesting, but can we get some background about why it's particularly remarkable? I haven't heard of the author, and though it's an interesting topic, there seem to be a lot of other textbooks in the same field. What's special about this one?

⬐ jmount

He is one of the major experts on type systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Harper_(computer_scienti...

⬐ noblethrasher

The author is an accomplished computer scientist in his own right but he's recently become more (in)famous for his critiques of Haskell in his new blog: http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/

Here's a recent HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4380900

⬐ Bjoern

Price: $72.81 Wonder how much Harper gets from that.

⬐ jdale27

Free draft: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/plbook/book.pdf

(Get it while you can... Publishers often require authors to take down drafts once the book is published.)

⬐ icebraining

It's CC licensed, so anyone can distribute a copy. It doesn't matter if the author takes it down.

⬐ jdale27

Oops, I missed that. Thanks for the correction.

⬐ phao

Thanks!

⬐ imurray

> Get it while you can

This book is published by Cambridge University Press who have a good track record for allowing electronic copies to stay up [1]. It will be interesting to see how they adapt as e-readers become a compelling alternative to hard-copy for this type of text of book. I'm afraid I won't like the answer.

[1] Examples: http://www.stanford.edu/~boyd/cvxbook/ http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html