Ken Louden's new edition of PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE provides students with an overview of key issues in the study of programming languages. Rather than focus on individual language issues, Kenneth Louden focuses on language paradigms and concepts that are common to all languages. Louden also includes materials that is frequently not found in other introductory texts, such as implementation issues and theoretical foundations of programming languages. Coverage of these topics helps serve as a bridge to students' compiler courses and other theoretical computer science courses. In addition, Louden's treatment of semantics is distinctive. Louden introduces students to informal semantics in Chapter 5, using scope and symbol tables as the primary examples. Formal semantics are introduced in Chapter 13. This material is enhanced by utable versions of the operational and denotational specifications using Prolog and ML.