Hey! Thorsten Ball here. I'd say: yes, they're similar, but still two different perspectives on the same subject. (I actually recounted elsewhere [0] how Bob convinced me, 4 years ago now, that it's valuable to have multiple teachers of the same subject.)

So if you're into the topic I think you can get something out of my books ([1], [2]) even if you've read Bob's book before. And if you read mine, then Bob's book will also show you something new.

I'm currently working through Bob's book myself (chapter 23) and I'm enjoying it immensely: the language, Lox, shares a lot of things with the one in my books (Monkey), like first-class functions and closures, but also has classes which Monkey does not. So now I can read Bob's book and on one hand think "Ohh, I wonder how he does _that_" and on the other hand "classes! let's see how that works."

My books also use Go exclusively and Bob's uses Java and C. I enjoyed using IntelliJ and writing Java for the first time in my life a lot and was always a fan of C, so that was also really interesting, to see how the ideas translate across three languages.

[0]: https://lobste.rs/s/43h7rz/crafting_interpreters_handbook_fo... [1]: https://interpreterbook.com [2]: https://compilerbook.com