Customer Reviews

Building Your Own Compiler with C++

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4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Though I admittely have the previous print of this book, I am fairly convinced that my judgements of that book hold true for this edition. The C++ code presented here is some of the worst I have ever seen. The earlier chapters actually try to be a crashcourse C++. I got the distinct feeling in later chapters that the author's full knowledge of this wonderful language are unfortunately contained therein.

The detail level of this book is saddeningly low. Being 112 pages (194 in my edition) this is hardly a surprise anymore.

Long story short, if you want to see someone write bad but well documented code for a simple compiler, by all means buy this. If you want to know how things actually work, more books will be a necessity. My suggestion for theory: Dragon Book (Aho et al.) and add Holub's "Compiler Design in C" for a practical hands-on, but in-depth approach.

Do NOT buy this book... This is really bad.

This was one of my first compiler text I bought around 10 years ago. Don't make the same mistake!

If you're looking for a learning-by-coding compiler text buy 'Programming Languages processors in Java' by Watt and Brown. See my 5 star review there.... Second choice: If you're looking for a C++-book buy 'Compilers and Interpreters' from Ronald Mak.

This are the problems with this book:

* The language of the compiler your build in this book is too simple. There are only 2 statements: assignment statements and writeline statements. So after you study this book you know NOTHING about how to generate code for function calling, passing parameters, records, arrays because all this is not supported! Even things like IF-statement and a WHILE-loop is too difficult for the author. Extending the language with an IF-statement is an exercise, probably because the author couldn't get it working hisself.....

* If the book explains something it's only to clarify the code and not to explain you the algorithms behind it. So it tells you that a Yacc parser is called by the yyparse() function, but this book even don't tell you what parsing is, what methods there are (LL/LR etc), etc. The only you need to know is yyparse(). The author give you a Grammer file, but you may find out yourself how the grammer file is organized (BNF). So after you read this book you will still ask: 'what is parsing? what is scanning? how does Yacc work?' etc. etc.

* It is one big listing and it doesn't explain much.

Conclusion: the compiler is way too simple, the author explain nothing, and after you read this book you will have no more fundamental compiler design knowledge than you had before!

For people which are new to compiler construction will learn nothing, and for people which have advanced knowledge about compiler construction (like me) it's too simple and will discover a lot of mistakes.

Avoid this book!

1)This book is a nice one to read for Beginners in this context 2)Ease to understand is extra value to this book. 3)This book edges out many others in this category. 4)I would recomend this book to novice programmers.