Rating:
(19 reviews)
Author: Alfred V. Aho
ISBN : 0321486811
New from $89.99
Format: PDF
Download electronic versions of selected books Free Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools, known to professors, students, and developers worldwide as the "Dragon Book," is available in a new edition. Every chapter has been completely revised to reflect developments in software engineering, programming languages, and computer architecture that have occurred since 1986, when the last edition published. The authors, recognizing that few readers will ever go on to construct a compiler, retain their focus on the broader set of problems faced in software design and software development.
Books with free ebook downloads available Free Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (2nd Edition) [Hardcover]
- Hardcover: 1000 pages
- Publisher: Addison Wesley; 2nd edition (September 10, 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0321486811
- ISBN-13: 978-0321486813
- Product Dimensions: 1.6 x 6.6 x 9.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
I spent some serious quality time with the first edition (the "red dragon book"), in three main episodes over the past dozen years: 1) undergraduate compilers class, 2) industry project, and 3) parser generator implementation. During all three episodes, I was disappointed in various ways, though there is no denying that the book contains a wealth of information. As an undergraduate, I found the book somewhat impenetrable. When in industry, I found the book too abstract. When implementing a parser generator, I discovered that the book excludes important research results with regard to LR parser generation. It is the last disappointment that I will focus on.
The book presents parser generation in layers of increasing complexity, from SLR to LR to LALR, where LALR is presented as the penultimate algorithm, though LALR parsers can only handle a subset of the grammars that LR can handle. The justification for this is that the original Knuth LR algorithm is intractable for large grammars. However, an efficient, fully correct, approach for LR parser generation was published in 1977, and on top of that it appears easier to implement than efficient LALR parser generation! The red dragon book's original authors simply cannot have been unaware of this research result, but I suspect that they elected to warm over the "green dragon book" (published in 1977) rather than incorporate the state of the art as of 1986 into the "red dragon book". Now here we are another 20 years later, and as near as I can tell from reading through available online information, the "purple dragon book" is perpetuating this omission. The result of the red dragon book is that we have an entire generation of computer scientists who have been mislead to think that LALR is somehow superior to LR, and the purple dragon book is setting things up for yet another generation to be mislead.
By Jason Evans
Aho, Ullman et. al's "Compilers" is a fantastic book and well worth studying for all computer programmers - implementing a compiler compiler will yield tangental benefits to anyone who writes programs for a living or for fun.
However, the Amazon Kindle edition of this book is *awful*. First and foremost, I discovered at least one error in an algorithm that is not present in the standard edition that causes the book's proposed algorithms to be incorrect (in this case, it was algorithm 4.31 - in step 1, you should compute FIRST(alpha), not FIRST(A).)
On top of that, there are spacing issues and font issues throughout the book. It appears that in many places where the standard edition had a word separated across lines, the Kindle edition merely has that word split in two with a space between its halves. Worse, the font choice used to typeset algorithms doesn't easily distinguish many greek lowercase letters from their modern English equivalents, the result being that it is fiendishly difficult to understand some algorithms (the book uses greek letters to indicate a 'sentential form', so they appear a *lot* and tend to be right next to their modern equivalents.)
In other words, I would give Compilers (the Standard edition) a 5/5 (or maybe a 4/5 - it could stand to use a bit more real-world code), but this Kindle edition is rubbish and you SHOULD NOT BUY.
By Erich Blume
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