lex & yacc 2nd Edition

by Doug Brown (Author), John Levine (Author), Tony Mason (Author)

37 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-1565920002

ISBN-10: 1565920007

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This book shows you how to use two Unix utilities, lex andyacc, in program development. These tools 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 andyacc, and Abraxas PCYACC

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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

About the Author

Gregory Satir helps develop online publishing tools in the Portland, Oregon, office of Electronic Book Technologies. He graduated with a B.S. in computer science from Brown University. Doug Brown is a consultant/contractor in Beaverton, Oregon. He has been developing software for circuit simulation, synthesis, and testing since 1977. Doug coauthored lex & yacc, another O'Reilly & Associates Nutshell Handbook. He received an M.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1976.

John R. Levine writes, lectures, and consults on Unix and compiler topics. He moderates the online comp.compilers discussion group at Usenet. He worked on Unix versions Lotus 1-2-3 and the Norton Utilities and was one of the architects of AIX for the IBM RT PC. He received a Ph.D in computer science from Yale in 1984.

Tony Mason is currently a member of the AFS development team at Transarc Corporation, a small start-up company specializing in distributed systems software. Previously, he worked with the Distributed Systems Group at Stanford University in the area of distributed operating systems and data communications. He received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1987.

Paperback: 388 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 2 edition (February 1, 1995)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1565920007
ISBN-13: 978-1565920002
Product Dimensions: 6 x 1 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
Average Customer Review: 37 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,040,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #81 in Books > Computers & Technology > Software > Utilities
- #300 in Books > Computers & Technology > Operating Systems > Unix
- #917 in Books > Textbooks > Computer Science > Operating Systems

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Five Stars

ByKatrinaon May 15, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

A classic book

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I like this book because it covered parsing and tokenizing from ...

Byefrankamoon November 6, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I like this book because it covered parsing and tokenizing from a deeper standpoint. Will re-read a few more times.

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Classic book.

ByRoger George Dosson November 10, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Classic book.

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Best book currently available on the subject

ByKeith Savageon December 29, 2000

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Lex & Yacc are extremely powerful programming tools. They are also difficult to master. This book provides a good start. You may need to read it several times and work through the examples before things begin making sense. I also recommend the FSF's book "The Bison Manual" for indepth info on the most common Yacc-compatible parse generator.

0Comment One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Pure happiness

Bybezieron March 26, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Very nice but hang on, because it is tough business. On another hand, if you want to build a compiler...

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Incomplete, poorly organized, and not very well written

ByA customeron April 6, 1999

Format: 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.

11 comment 24 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Not good, but beggars can't be choosers

ByA customeron October 9, 2001

Format: Paperback

There is too much repetition of basic ideas in the first few chapters of the book, and not enough coverage of more advanced topics (like how to use marker nonterminals, how to use $<>$ constructs, etc).
The discussion of shift/reduce and reduce/reduce conflicts in chaper 8 is pretty good though and would make a fine introduction for a beginner wanting to learn /basic/ concepts.
Good error handling is definitely a black art, but I still would have liked to have been given more information about it in chapter 9. The examples were also a bit too soft.
Chapters 4 and 5 have some interesting (and highly unusual)examples for scanning and parsing applications, but they do not show off many of the advanced capabilites of lex and yacc. What this book really needs are couple of examples that demonstrate how to overcome classic scanning and parsing horrors (like how to do type checking in, say, C); a chapter like this instead of one of chapters 4 or 5 would be great.
Even today lex and yacc are very important tools in the computer scientist's toolkit. They were designed 25 (or so) years ago, but /real/ documentation is still nonexistant. This means that unfortunately, this book is one of the best.
I think that the FSF's Bison manual is much better value for money. It also does not cover advanced topics in enough depth, but what is does explain, it explains quite clearly.