Customer Reviews

Understanding and Writing Compilers: A Do It Yourself Guide (Macmillan Computer Science Series)

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I'm a great fan of the first edition of this book(circa 1980). It explains the mechanics of parsing ratherthan just throwing a lot of math and proofs at the reader (e.g. Aho, Hopcroft or Ullman). You come away feeling that you could actually write a compiler. One caution: the figures in the first edition contained many errors. Let's hope they've been fixed in the new edition.

This is one of a few computer science books that remains rather
special to me. I began learning about LALR(1) parsing and code
generation from this book. It and a small book on YACC were
enough to enable me to write a compiler for a 4GL. I have since
seen many other good (and not so good) books but this is a
personal favourite. It is full of practical advice while
maintaining a high standard of scholarship and provided a good
introduction to the subject.

One of the highlights of this book is the treatment of code generation issues, in addition to parsing/lexing. A book for practical programmers who're interested in any code generation problem. Very readable.