Flex & Bison: Text Processing Tools [Paperback]

John Levine (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0596155972 | ISBN-13: 978-0596155971 | Publication Date: August 21, 2009 | Edition: 1

If you need to parse or process text data in Linux or Unix, this useful book explains how to use flex and bison to solve your problems quickly. flex & bison is the long-awaited sequel to the classic O'Reilly book, lex & yacc. In the nearly two decades since the original book was published, the flex and bison utilities have proven to be more reliable and more powerful than the original Unix tools.

flex & bison covers the same core functionality vital to Linux and Unix program development, along with several important new topics. You'll find revised tutorials for novices and references for advanced users, as well as an explanation of each utility's basic usage and simple, standalone applications you can create with them. With flex & bison, you'll discover the wide range of uses these flexible tools offer.

• Address syntax crunching that regular expressions tools can't handle
• Build compilers and interpreters, and handle a wide range of text processing functions
• Interpret code, configuration files, or any other structured format
• Learn key programming techniques, including abstract syntax trees and symbol tables
• Implement a full SQL grammar-with complete sample code
• Use new features such as pure (reentrant) lexers and parsers, powerful GLR parsers, and interfaces to C++

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

This book shows programmers how to use two UNIX utilities, lex and yacc, in program development. lex and yacc are tools that help programmers build compilers and interpreters, but they also have a wider range of applications. The second edition contains completely revised tutorial sections for novice users and reference sections for advanced users. This edition is twice the size of the first and has an expanded index. The following material has been added: Each utility is explained in a chapter that covers basic usage and simple, stand-alone applications How to implement a full SQL grammar, with full sample code Major MS-DOS and UNIX versions of lex and yacc are explored in-depth, including AT&T lex and yacc, Berkeley yacc, Berkeley/GNU Flex, GNU Bison, MKS lex and yacc, and Abraxas PCYACC --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

John Levine, founder of Taughannock Networks, writes, speaks, and consults on e-mail, the Internet, and other computer topics. He has written over 20 technical books, and is the co-author of O'Reilly's lex & yacc, 2nd Edition and qmail. He's also deeply involved in Internet e-mail in general and spam issues in particular as co-chair of the Internet Research Task Force's Anti-Spam Research Group (http://asrg.sp.am ) and a board member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (http://www.cauce.org.) He lives and works in the tiny village of Trumansburg NY (http://www.trumansburg.ny.us) where he reports that being the municipal sewer commissioner was a much cleaner job than dealing with spammers.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (August 21, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596155972
• ISBN-13: 978-0596155971
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #498,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Incomplete, poorly organized, and not very well written, April 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: lex & yacc (Paperback)

As with several other O'Reilly books, I found Lex & Yacc to be maddeningly uneven. The approach is to give a too-brief synopsis of the tool, then illustrate its use using a very specific example that, one suspects, is merely the handiest project the authors had available.

I had a fair bit of programming experience when I bought the book, but none with Lex or Yacc. Some fundamental questions came up during the course of my muddling through, and these were left unanswered. I actually got more insight into these tools from a ~20-page web site on the topic.

The reference chapters are organized alphabetically ("ambiguities & conflicts", "bugs", ..., "%ident declaration"), and in a way that does not help someone who is looking for a specific answer (in trying to find out about the possibility of more than one parser in a program, who would think to look under 'v' for "variant and multiple grammars"?). These 'reference chapters' seemed more like a place to dump the information not discussed elsewhere.

Maybe it's a lost cause, finding a comprehensive, well-written introduction to such an arcane topic, but I'm still looking.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars ok, but there is a better LEX/YACC book, April 26, 2004

By 

M. Rumore (Oswego, il USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: lex & yacc (Paperback)

To keep it simple, the book "Introduction to Compiler Construction in UNIX" introduces and explains LEX/YACC far better than this book. It uses a more realistic example and shows the error handling in more detail. This book is ok for a quick intro, but for a 'real" user, refer to the book I mentioned above.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, March 12, 2004

By 

J. Buchanan (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: lex & yacc (Paperback)

This book was disappointing. I had hoped for a tutorial and reference on Lex/Yacc Flex/Bison for building language recognisers, but in the tradition of "yet another boring and useless reverse polish notation" calculator - it gives us a desktop infix expression calculator. (How could I have possibly guessed?)

The book presents some interesting material for those who want to parse SQL, but if you're eager to learn about translating programming languages, this book is nearly useless. It gives superficial and confusing treatment of language constructs like "if-then-else" statements, and gives only an exercise for recognising a function call and "playing it back." (I feel these are cop-outs.) It also fails to explain clearly how to construct unambiguous grammars, or use facilities for operator precedence or whatver to control the ambiguity.

To be fair, I am guessing this was meant as a reference for Lex/Yacc for those who already know how to construct language recognisers and have some knowledge of using these tools. But then why bother to give especially bad tutorial material in the early chapters if this were the case?

This books is also in need of a new edition.