This is THE compiler design book. It's used in both undergraduate and graduate level computer engineering courses throughout the Western world. The immediate descendent of the classic Principles of Compiler Design by Aho and Ullman (the "Dragon Book"), it's 796 pages (hardback) of algorithms, diagrams, and code segments from (mostly) C and Pascal perspectives.

From the contents:

Chapter 1: Introduction to Compiling
Chapter 2: A Simple One-Pass Compiler
Chapter 3. Lexical Analysis
Chapter 4. Syntax Analysis
Chapter 5: Syntax-Directed Translation
Chapter 6: Type Checking
Chapter 7: Run-Time Environments
Chapter 8: Intermediate Code Generation
Chapter 9: Code Generation
Chapter 10: Code Optimization
Chapter 11: Want to Write a Compiler?
Chapter 12: A Look at Some Compilers
Appendix: A Compiler Project

It would be silly to recommend the text to students, because if you're taking collegiate or occupational compiler design, you'll be using it anyway. Instructors thinking of adopting the text can write me for specifics. This text is exlusively used by the Computer Science department at Ashland University

disorganized

Rating: 3/5

the biggest problem with this book is that it's very disorganized. i guess one reason might be that each of the 3 authors are so full of themselves that each one speak their own voice. the result is that you will see EVERY topic to be repeated 3 times in the book, and none of them really get clarified.

for a university student, this book may serve OK as a reference book, since you will mostly use the instructor's class notes anyway. what reference you use doesn't really matter.

for a self-learner, this book is really a terrible read. i recommend you get another book such as Thomas Pittman's , or as of 2004, Cooper and Torczon's .

to me, a book with more than 400 pages tends to be badly written. a book is thick mostly because the author(s) doesn't have time to make it thinner. though in this case, the authors have had about 20 years to revise the book. why didn't they do that?

compiler design is relatively easy to understand compared with other topics like numerical analysis. one needs only a high-school student's algebra and logic knowledge to understand what's going on, if the topic is carefully explained. the authors of this book pretend it's some esoteric high art (hinted by the ridiculous dragon-slaying cover art). confused by the disorganized explanation, you might as well buy that.

Trivial, non-constructive, hard-to-follow, terrible

Rating: 1/5

The worst textbook I've ever read.
For Many times I've been confused by the author's explanation for some very simple ideas.