Product Description

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.

New chapters include:  

Chapter 10 Instruction-Level Parallelism

Chapter 11 Optimizing for Parallelism and Locality

Chapter 12 Interprocedural Analysis

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37396 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1000 pages

From the Back Cover

This introduction to compilers is the direct descendant of the well-known book by Aho and Ullman, Principles of Compiler Design. The authors present updated coverage of compilers based on research and techniques that have been developed in the field over the past few years. The book provides a thorough introduction to compiler design and covers topics such as context-free grammars, fine state machines, and syntax-directed translation.

About the Author

Alfred V. Aho is Lawrence Gussman Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Professor Aho has won several awards including the Great Teacher Award for 2003 from the Society of Columbia Graduates and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal.  He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the ACM and IEEE.

Monica S. Lam is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, was the Chief Scientist at Tensilica and the founding CEO of moka5. She led the SUIF project which produced one of the most popular research compilers, and pioneered numerous compiler techniques used in industry.

Ravi Sethi launched the research organization in Avaya and is president of Avaya Labs.  Previously, he was a senior vice president at Bell Labs in Murray Hill and chief technical officer for communications software at Lucent Technologies. He has held teaching positions at the Pennsylvania State University and the University of Arizona, and has taught at Princeton University and Rutgers.  He is a fellow of the ACM.

Jeffrey Ullman is CEO of Gradiance and a Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. His research interests include database theory, database integration, data mining, and education using the information infrastructure.  He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the ACM, and winner of the Karlstrom Award and Knuth Prize.

Customer Reviews

The reference book ... depending on your needs
Once again, I want to point out the title of the book: "Principles, Techniques and Tools".
I think there are two kinds of compilers books available today: "Principles and Theory centered" ones and "Modern Compilers design and 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 and Regular expression along with relations and equivalence between the them; FSAs minimizations; grammars and Push-down FSAs in details, ambiguities and and how to cope with them; and 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 and (viable) prefixes, SLR or canonical LR or LALR parsers and techniques for the relative tables construction by hands (and for this, add a detailed and 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, and 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) and focus on coding techniques and modern compiler studying. But ... perhaps, for these purposes books like Grune's "Modern Compiler Design", or Pittman's "Art of Compiler Design, The: Theory and Practice" or, at some degrees, Muchnick's "Advanced Compiler Design and 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 and 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 all 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 and grammars and their theory is (for all practical purposes) still the same since even before then.

Complete, concise and in depth
This book is an absolute winner. People who complain that it is incoherent or poor generally havent studied it for long enough.

Compilers are a very technical subject, and it stands to reason that even with the best books, youre gonna have to read certain sections more than once to grasp the content.

Get this book in paperback if you can. Its much easier to flip through, which youll find yourself doing on a regular basis.

Best book for introduction to compilers
Although this book was published in 1986 but todate remains the best book on the various aspects of compiler design and 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 and 80's when compiler construction was a hot topic.
But, again the problems dealt in the book are pretty much generic to all programming languages.
Another deficiency with the book is its treatment of Object Oriented Programming languages.But, all in all the best book till date for laying the foundation of compilers.