Customer Reviews

Crafting a Compiler: Featuring Java

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I am 22. I found this rare book at a library sells, they were having a sell and sold this vbook for [money]. My interest at that time was compiler design. It was more out of curiosity, than for any real project. So, maybe this review is not from the perpsective of a professional, but a curious student 3 years ago. I did find this book to be rather incitive. This book is also heavy on terminology. As in the first chapter they give a detailed desciption of different classes of compilers. The second chapter goes into lexical analysis. And the next few chapters they give the student an excercise to write a small compiler, that is rather trivial. That is the plus of this book, they give excercises for the student.

This book also has a chapter on scanning, which is the best I ever seen in any compiler design book I have ever read. They talk about concepts of set theory as it relates to lexical analysis. Then they talk about regular expression and Fintie automata. This book is a great read indeed, and very easy to read.

There are quite of few chapters dedicated to parsing. In the chapters related to parsing they give a comparisons to Top Down and Bottom up parsing. They even go well known utilities like Yacc. The last few chapters go into depth chapter by chapter on implementing control structures:conditional, itereative, recursive. Even the appropiate runtimes, like code generation. There is even one chapter that goes into the fundemental Data Structures for a compiler. The last chapters is called "Parsing In The Real World".

The code example in this book are based off of a language the ADA-CS langauge. There is a brief tutorial of this language. But the code is just illustration, as they do not use a full langauge for the illustration. I think this is important, because the book focuses more on design rather then design with a particular langauge.

I really cant find anything wrong with this book. I definitely got more than my money's worth on this book. As I only spent [money] on this book. But I would have easily spent [money] on this book easily. Simply because I am drawn to this type of information. And even in 1999 when I found this book, compiler design was not demanded in the workplace much, I still find this a great book for students.

I would encourage anyone to purchase this book. If you can find this book that is. I'm sure this book is very hard rto find. My book is a Instructors book, and was not previously for sell. But if you ever see this book at a yard sell, lirbrary sell, please pick it up. Especially if you are student.

I ordered this book from the amazon.It was a used one (Thus i paid less)but it cames in good state. I am using it and everything is going well so far...

This book uses a weird pseudocode to give examples and keeps referring to examples that are a number of pages behind what you are reading. Buy the Dragon book - its much much better and gives you deeper insight.