Book excerpts:

The book covers the foundations of structural operational semantics (where computations consist of many small steps) and natural semantics (where computations consist of one big step). It shows how to describe the semantics of declarative as well as imperative language constructs and will also touch upon non-sequential constructs. It also presents proof principles for operational semantics and investigate the relationship between the two approaches to operational semantics.

Problems from areas such as compiler construction, software validation, and program verication will be used to demonstrate the practical utility of semantics.