I rate Compiler Construction: Principles and Practice to the same category as legendary Kernighan/Ritchie C Programming Language, Petzold's Programming Windows or Richter's Programming Server Side Applications for MS Windows 2000. This is one of the best books I have ever read.
Compiler construction is relatively hard topic with lot of theory needed to be understood before you can write even the most trivial compiler. Regular expressions, finite automata, BNF or attribute grammars are just few things you need to know and known them very well before you can write you own compiler.
Many books paying too much attention to theory, but theory itself without many practical examples is nearly useless - especially if you are new in this field. You need examples, very good, thoroughly explained examples and even better source code where theory is transformed into practice. This is something that the book does and does it very well.
Every topic is covered by such examples and at the end of every chapter there is practical implementation of scanner, parser (recursive descent), semantic analyzer and code generator in 'raw' C, using very simple (but useful) language called TINY.
Another great thing is how the book is organized. First chapter introduces major steps in compiler design like scanning, parsing, semantic, runtime environment, code generation and subsequent chapters dealing with these topics. That's great, because after finishing each chapter you can write your own scanner (chapter 2), top down parser (chapter 4), bottom up parser (chapter 5), semantic analyzer (chapter 6) and runtime environment and code generation (last 2 chapters).
Probably the best 'proof' how great this book is, is the fact that I as an absolute beginner in compiler construction (I have been working professionally as developer for 10 years), was able to write down my own scanner, parser (LL(1), LR(1), and also LALR(1)), semantic analyzer and code generator to 0x86 MASM ASSEMBLER in 'raw' C#, without using of any automatic generators like Lex or Yacc for simple C- language presented in the book (language has global and local variables, procedures, simple arrays and strings).
Compiler Construction: Principles and Practice is the best book for everyone who has no previous experience with compiler construction. Book doesn't cover all advanced topics but it's the best material for those ones who are new in this field. After finishing book you will have enough theoretical and practical experiences to move to more advanced books (but also much more difficult to grasp) like famous Dragon book.
ISBN-13: 978-0534939724
ISBN-10: 0534939724
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Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2014
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Top reviews from other countries
ducky
Very heavy subject and not for the faint hearted. ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 5, 2018Verified Purchase
Vilibald W.
Great quick intro with practical examples in C
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 24, 2014Verified Purchase
