The goal of the book is to provide the basis for a critical understanding of most modern programming languages Thus rather than focusing on a specific language the book identifies the most important principles shared by large classes of languages The notion of abstract machine is a unifying concept that helps to maintain an accurate and elementary treatment The book introduces analyses in depth and compares the imperative object oriented functional logic concurrent constraint based and service oriented programming paradigms All material coming from the first English edition has been updated and extended clarifying some tricky points and discussing newer programming languages This second edition contains new chapters dedicated to constraint concurrent and service oriented programming