I found reading this book very frustrating for several reasons.

The first reason was that it would explain similar concepts in different programming languages with almost identical text with only a few words changed. It would have been much better if the book was organized to not be just an inventory of the features of the example languages but would contrast their meaning. It also seemed to focus more on the differing syntaxes of the languages instead of the similar or different semantics behind those syntaxes. It also would have been a stronger book if it mentioned concepts that were present in some languages not surveyed by the book.

It was also not very objective and would make value judgements about the languages, usually by praising Ada's attributes and disparaging C and C++.

Another problem that I found was that it had factual errors about C and C++. For example, it made an emphatic point of saying that C++ arrays could only be initialized... Read more

I would everyone recommend NOT to buy this book, but to buy 'Programming Language Pragmatics' by Michael L. Scott.

The problem with this book is this:

It has a very practical approach. This would be nice for some class of readers, but the problem is that the title suggest it's about language design & concepts (so theory).

This book tells you e.g. in short what a classes/objects are, and then a lot of examples in different languages how to define classes and work with objects.

The problem is, that it doesn't tell me anything about the core concepts of OO like inheritance and information hiding. Sure it tells me what inheritance is, and how to do this in different languages, but it doesn't tell me the path to inheritance (what was before, why we have it now), so the concept behind the concept is missing.

So I don't read in this book the concepts behind the concepts. What's the history of OO, how we did get here(Algol -> Modula,... Read more

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