Constructing Language Processors for Little Languages

I've recently had the need to understand how lex and yacc work. I bought this book probably back in 1999 or so; it's sat on my book shelf ever since, having only gotten about three chapters into it. Today I pulled it out for kicks, and was delighted to find chapter eight is all about lex and yacc; the first seven chapters lead the reader through the writing of a simple language parser for a language he calls "IML," or Image Manipulation Language. (Think a small database of meta information about a large collection of image files; the language lets you do various manipulations with those files). Kaplan's writing style is very personal and conversational; the target audience is working programmers. This is always a great combination for programming books. Since the examples are all in standard C, it will be many more years before this book really becomes outdated. Sadly the code examples are on a floppy that comes with the book, so you better have a floppy drive!

This is a good, basic, "gateway" book on compiler and interpreter design and implementation. It can easily provide the reader with the basic concepts of this tricky topic in a way that will allow the reader to move on to more complicated materials.Having taken a compiler construction class in college using "Compilers : Principles, Techniques, and Tools", I can say that this book is much easier to understand and I wish we had spent the first 2-3 weeks of the course covering the material therein.If you are new to compiler construction or are interested in producing a simple interpreter, this book is for you. If you already consider yourself well read in compiler technology, this book may be of questionable value.