Cheap DVDs, books, CDs & Games

Search:

Compilers - Principles, Techniques and Tools

By: Alfred V. Aho Ravi Sethi Jeffrey D. Ullman
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Addison Wesley
ISBN: 0201100886
ISBN-13: 9780201100884
Released: 01 Jan 1985
RRP: £70.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

A must have - By: Pedro Rodrigues, 12 Jul 2006
This book is a bible for compiler study & development, one of the best references available.
It starts by explaining what is a compiler & how it works & gives an example of a simple compiler before getting to each phase in detail.
It reallly is a very good book, & I don't give it 5 stars only because it is not very clear, sometimes the examples are confusing & not very well explained (LR Parsers for example are very hard to follow if you don't have other references).
If you are interested in understanding how a compiler works, this book is ideal & you'll be very satisfied, but if you plan to develop a compiler this book will "only" give you the (very important) theoretical grounds.
a favourite of mine - By: , 27 Jun 2005
looks like such a weedy book on first glance, especiallly next to my
knuth boxset! but the depth is quite astounding. the amount devoted to icode, code generation & optimization is impressive in
the latter chapters. this book is a little mathematical &
abstract & maybe a little off putting to someone looking for a step by step recipe for a compiler, but i tell you, suck it up
and learn the maths. you will find it well worth the investment...
Well pitched Introduction to compilers - By: , 01 Mar 2004
In my opinion this book is excelently pitched, it is interesting to read, & requires some thought to fully appriciate the implications of some parts of it, but it's not boring by any means, & it's not massivly over my head either. The book is fairly old, & the examples seem to revlove around pascal quite a lot, but that isn't reallly a hinderence, anyone with a reasonable understanding of computers & languages should be able to pick this up & still make sense even if you've never heard of fortran or algol before ever. Highly recommended as an introduction to the theory of compilers.
The reference book ... depending on your needs - By: , 17 Jul 2002
Once again, I want to point out the title of the book: "Principles, Techniques & Tools".
I think there are two kinds of compilers books available today: "Principles & Theory centered" ones & "Modern Compilers design & 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 & Regular expression along with relations & equivalence between the them; FSAs minimizations; grammars & Push-down FSAs in details, ambiguities & and how to cope with them; & 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 & (viable) prefixes, SLR or canonical LR or LALR parsers & techniques for the relative tables construction by hands (and for this, add a detailed & 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, & 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) & focus on coding techniques & modern compiler studying. But ... perhaps, for these purposes books like Grune's "Modern Compiler Design", or Pittman's "Art of Compiler Design, The: Theory & Practice" or, at some degrees, Muchnick's "Advanced Compiler Design & 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 & 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 alll 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 & grammars & their theory is (for alll practical purposes) still the same since even before then.

Best book for introduction to compilers - By: Sunil Kothari, 31 Jan 2002
Although this book was published in 1986 but todate remains the best book on the various aspects of compiler design & theory. The book is not be treated as a practical guide. It gives you a sound theoretical foundation. You have to use another book, may be by Appel, for more practical approach. The only flaw with this book
is that its got flavor for PASCAL which was pretty much the norm when it was first published.
Also, the book draws its contents from the numerous papers published in 70's & 80's when compiler construction was a hot topic.
But, again the problems dealt in the book are pretty much generic to alll programming languages.
Another deficiency with the book is its treatment of Object Oriented Programming languages.But, alll in alll the best book till date for laying the foundation of compilers.