Compilers

Chapters 5-11 of the forthcoming second edition of the Dragon book are available online at the publisher's website.

Once again, I want to point out the title of the book: "Principles, Techniques and Tools".I think there are two kinds of compilers books available today: "Principles and Theory centered" ones and "Modern Compilers design and implementation" ones.One might wonder what's the difference between the two. The former kind is more suited for a course on theoretical aspects that lay the foundation of compiler construction. DFAs, NFAs and Regular expression along with relations and equivalence between the them; FSAs minimizations; grammars and Push-down FSAs in details, ambiguities and and how to cope with them; and so on.This is what I mean for "theoretical aspects". And these topics are covered in great details in this book. Almost the same details they (the authors) placed on writing a more specific book as "Introduction to Automata Theory ...".Same situation applies to principles on more application- oriented topics. Take the example of LR parsing. You can face the topic from a more theoretical side, dealing with details on bottom up parsing (still, it implies an in-depth knowledge of grammars theory), handles and (viable) prefixes, SLR or canonical LR or LALR parsers and techniques for the relative tables construction by hands (and for this, add a detailed and solid knowledge of Push-down FSAs along with grammars). By hands, at least, if principles are what matter in your course. If you expect to find these topics (with this depth) in a book of the other kind, you might get mislead. As I did when I still had not clear this distinction, before I took the course.The latter kind of books is more suited for a more pragmatic course. One where real, "modern" compilers are at hands, and probably written as homeworks. In this case, time being always limited in a university course, one (the instructor) will likely have to give up with those theoretical aspects (or just mention them) and focus on coding techniques and modern compiler studying. But ... perhaps, for these purposes books like Grune's "Modern Compiler Design", or Pittman's "Art of Compiler Design, The: Theory and Practice" or, at some degrees, Muchnick's "Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation" will be more suited.Back to the LR parsing example, more pragmatic compilers design courses will (for time constraints) just have a glance on principles and spend a considerable time learning YACC. To do both things you would have to take a course on YACC alone (it requires time to exploit all of its advanced features, you can be sure of this).All this said, once again: which is the best book ? The one that best fits your needs. And in fact, my needs were those of my course, which was completely centered on theoretical aspects. And for this course, the Dragon book (as it is better known since its cover) proved to be perfect, definitely no matter it was published on 1986: FSAs and grammars and their theory is (for all practical purposes) still the same since even before then.

This is really a terrific book. It covers every phase of constructing a compiler, including both design and implementation issues. The text is well-written, comprehensive, and gives a pretty good mix of theory and practical information. There is a lot of theory involved, of course. Others have said this, but I will repeat it. This is not a cookbook. If you want to get the most out of it, you should have a good grasp of a HLL (the examples are in C), as well as some mathematical background and a familiarity with CS topics like automata theory and data structures. People looking for a cut and paste approach to compiler construction will be disappointed. Those who are genuinely interested in compiler construction and who are willing to invest some time and thought will not be.

During each compiler stage (lexical analysis, syntax analysis, translation, type checking, translation, code generation, and code optimization) multiple methods, strategies, and algorithms are presented. This comprehensive book examines items that are unique to the various languages presented (Fortran, C, and Pascal); there are even sections on dealing with estimation of types (10.12) and symbolic debugging of optimized code (10.13). Wow! The exercises are thorough, challenging, and thought provoking. Examples are interleaved with the discussion and algorithms. There is an excellent set of historical and bibliographic information at the end of each chapter. The use of automated tools such as lex, yacc, and compiler-generators is discussed throughout the text. This is an advanced book, however a good understanding of compilers can be obtained without understanding the details of every algorithm.

This is a comprehensive and easy to understand text. It covers all the fundamental stages of compiler design, with plenty of explanation (both practical and theoretical). It doesn't exhaustively cover every conceivable topic, but it does leave you with a good taste of what's involved. Of course, it is not a book for beginning programmers, and there are very few code examples. Judging by the comments of some reviewers, I would suspect that they gave poor reviews because they lacked the prerequisite background (familiarity with a good HLL like C, data structures, mathematical background etc). As with any 'advanced' topic in computer science, there is quite a lot expected from you. Upon first reading, some topics occasionally seem overwhelming. Welcome to Earth. This is where your library card comes in. Do a little research and then come back to this text; you'll find that it is well organized and extremely clear. If you want a cookbook this book isn't for you. If you want a solid understanding of compiler fundamentals then this book is your best bet.