Denotational Semantics
A friend of mine showed me some examples of the qualifying exams he'll have to take to get accepted into his Ph.D. program, and the Programming Language exams all asked the examinee to give the denotational semantics of a simple language for which the syntax was given.
Although I'm somewhat familiar with what it means to talk about semantics (as opposed to syntax and pragmatics), I'd definitely like to have a better understanding of how one actually gives a formal semantics of a language.
To this end, I did a little bit of searching, and found an out-of-print textbook entitled Denotational Semantics: A Methodology For Language Development. I've read through the first couple of chapters and the table of contents, and it seems like it's exactly what I was looking for.
So far, the introduction to the concepts has been clear, and the mathematics have been built up without too much prior knowledge expected. Some other CS theory textbooks have lost me in their heavy math from the get-go, so I'm glad my lack of experience with mathematical notation isn't holding me back on this one.
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