Book – Compiler principles… (The red dragon book)
Parsing and languages have always been one of my main interests when it comes to programming.
So a few weeks ago I decided to buy the “red dragon book” from Amazon.com.
http://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-Alfred-Aho/dp/0201100886
(note: For some reason I managed to buy the edition from 1986 instead of 2006)
It is definetly one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read.
Maybe the most interesting part is that It is very humbeling to see how bloody brilliant those old computer science language guys are.
My biggest problem at the moment is that I fall asleep every 3-4 pages.
It is not because of boredom or anything, it’s just that I have to pause and reflect on what I have read for each page and that’s when I fall asleep :-)
So if you are into geeky stuff like domain specific languages and such, read the book, it’s awesome!
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I found this book a bit over the top at times, but at the same time, you can be sure everything there is to know about this (except perhaps modern graph-based optimization techniques) is in that book.
And indeed, the writers didn’t really try to make the reader eager to turn pages, but then again, each page contains so much stuff, that it would be too much to read 20 pages in one go ;)
Frans Bouma
June 19, 2008 at 7:59 am
I think this is really interesting as book consumers often think that any computer science book older than last month or so is obsolete… Maybe the Red Dragon book would be a nice candidate for re-reading, I have it on my shelf since a compiler class about 15 years ago.
Per Salmi
June 19, 2008 at 12:22 pm
That book is worth owning just because of the Red Dragon. I bought it in college for my compiler constructon course I took. The old version… B)
PumpkinEater
June 30, 2008 at 9:30 am