Product Description

If you need to parse or process text data in Linux or Unix, this classic book explains how to use flex and bison to solve your problems quickly - whether you're interpreting code, configuration files, or any other structured format. "Flex and Bison" is the long-awaited sequel to the classic O'Reilly book, "Lex and Yacc". In the nearly two decades since that book was published, the "Flex and Bison" utilities have proven to be more reliable and more powerful than the original Unix tools. This book covers the same core functionality vital to Linux and Unix program development, along with several important new topics. This thoroughly updated edition will help you: address syntax crunching that regular expressions tools can't handle; build compilers and interpreters, and handle a wide range of text processing functions; learn key programming techniques, including syntax trees and symbol tables; implement a full SQL grammar, with complete sample code; and, use new features such as pure (reentrant) lexers and parsers, powerful GLR parsers, and interfaces to C++. This book includes revised tutorial sections for novice users and reference sections for advanced users, with chapters that explain each utility's basic usage and simple, stand-alone applications. Dive into "Flex and Bison" and discover the wide range of uses these flexible tools provide.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #251969 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 292 pages

From the Publisher
Shows programmers how to use two Unix utilities, lex and yacc, in program development. You'll find tutorial sections for novice users, reference sections for advanced users, and a detailed index. Major MS-DOS and Unix versions of lex and yacc are explored in depth. Also covers Bison and Flex.

About the Author
John Levine, founder of Taughannock Networks, writes, speaks, and consults on e-mail, the Internet, and other computer topics. He has written over 20 technical books, and is the co-author of O'Reilly's lex & yacc, 2nd Edition and qmail. He's also deeply involved in Internet e-mail in general and spam issues in particular as co-chair of the Internet Research Task Force's Anti-Spam Research Group (http://asrg.sp.am ) and a board member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (http://www.cauce.org.) He lives and works in the tiny village of Trumansburg NY (http://www.trumansburg.ny.us) where he reports that being the municipal sewer commissioner was a much cleaner job than dealing with spammers.

Customer Reviews

Better than nothing
Except for the commercial versions of lex & yacc, there is scant documentation on these potentially very useful tools. This book ought therefore to be very welcome. Unfortunately it fails to deliver some important goods, like an explanation of the cryptic, mostly undocumented diagnostic messages that come out of yacc, or a substantial example of how to embed yyparse in another application--so as to do something useful, other than just validating syntax.

The review of different implementations is valuable, and the comments on portability were extremely helpful to me.

This book has been around for a while, and neither lex nor yacc have evolved much in the last many years, so the authors could reasonably have been asked to produce a more exhaustive second edition by now. It would necessarily have become a standard work. Unfortunately this present volume is often more tantalizing than helpful. Still, it's better than nothing.

Very good, badly needed, but incomplete and frustrating
In general this book is very good, and I would highly recommended it for anybody using tools like lex and yacc. It covers all the areas (both good and bad) of these tools. However, I find that the book is frustrating and incomplete in two ways :- (1) when it comes to solving some of the problems reported by such tools as lex and yacc, there is not enough of examples, especially less-trivial examples, and some of the more potentially obscure problems that can occur. (2) it is very frustrating that the page numbers listed in the index are out by 1 or 2 pages. In this era of technology this should not happen.

The best out there
A really good book...this is basically the only good tutorial/reference on purely yacc/lex topics. If I have one complaint it is that it should be a little longer, but otherwise it's great; it covers all the lex/yacc versions including flex and bison, has good examples as well as thorough explanations of key concepts. If you need to parse a complex file format or compile a language, this is basically required reading.