Customer Reviews

Compiler Design in C (Prentice-Hall software series)

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This book is a must have. It uses the dragon book (Compilers: principles, techniques and tools by Aho et.al) as a model but goes a great deal further in its use of examples when explaining the theory. Whenever I had a little trouble understanding the dragon book or wished that more examples were used I turned to Holub's book. The book is extremely well organized. If you want the theory its all there and if you want to just look at code its all there too: thousands of lines of it! After explaining everything you actually get to see how lex and yacc are built (from the ground up) and finally a C compiler. BUY IT NOW!!

This book is more accessible than the Dragon book (Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools) but is less complete. This book presents complete source code for parser generators tools and a C compiler. Even if this book is getting a little bit old and it targets a DOS platform, it should not stop you from acquiring this goldmine of very useful information for anyone interested in compilers for a very reasonable price.

I have had this book for 8 years. It clearly describes compiler theories and examples. It is very useful when I develop very fast parser. (The code generated by lex isn't fast enough.) I am not in the compiler writing business. This book is perfect for me.

Only a few words. Using this book, I designed a few compilers for testing languages, using Portuguese words and commands. It is yet on the development age, but, without this book it would not be abler at all.

There are so many books on Compilers & their Design. Why does this stand out? (1) It's out of print. (2) If you want to see - everything! It is in there. (3) There are no hidden issues / vacuously covered details.

Too many computer Writers do just that! Check out Holub's article in Visual Studio's v6 Developers Network - resource.

I bought this book after reading the Dragon Book (Aho,Sethi,Ullman). While Dragon Book is more on theory and less on practical compiler design, this book will take you to the very foundation of compilers both theory and practical in a very simple and easy to understand language and with lots of examples. You will also learn the secrets behind compiler generators like Yaac and Lex. Good explanation about top down parsing bottom-up parsing , recursive descend parsing etc. This is a must for anyone who would like to seriously learn compiler design for practical purpose.