Retargetable C Compiler, A: Design and Implementation

A+ amazon seller, quick delivery, excellent book.

I wish all programmers made books like this one about their products. It would make life so much easier.This book contains literally all the code that you just concatenate together and get a full, working LCC compiler which I think is pretty cool. It's also the best form of commenting your code :v

Good description of compilers without getting bogged down in theory.

Got the package today, the book is in very nice condition. Excellent.

This book is definitely _not_ for beginners, but compilers are not supposed to be written by novices -- if there is rocket science in computers, it is compiler development. Crystal clear style and language make this book easy reading, and LCC is the best non-optimizing compiler I've seen (and believe me, I've seen many compiler sources): orthogonal, easy to follow design, well-thought data structures and overall architecture.I treat this book as a perfect collection of brilliant ideas, many of which you will find implemented in most commercial compilers.Whether it helps to write your own compiler? -- sure. Are you thinking about IR (internal representation) that will be easy to create and, most important, walk through and manipulate? -- take a look how Fraser et al did it; they did it well. Think how to write a front end or code generator? -- it's all there. Sure, blind copying won't work -- optimizing compiler will call for way more sophisticated BURG-like technique (one of the best known code generation techniques by now), but, all in all, it'll be BURG-like, and it's in the book as well.So, if you want to show your students (or learn yourself) how compilers should be written, you cannot find anything better than LCC accompanied by this book. Fraser's team did it right.

First of all, this book is not for starters in the area of compiler design. Starters in the area of compiler design who are looking for a 'cookbook', I recommend to read 'Programming Language Processors in Java: Compilers and Interpreters' by David Watt.Why do I like this book? Because it is a cookbook for a 'full blown' C Compiler in C itself. Well actually it's a compiler for a subset of C, but it is still very comprehensive!It offers a lot of code snippets which are really well commented about what/where/how.A disadvantage of this book is that it doesn't cover advanced topics such as code optimizations. This is the area where the action is right now. All other parts (scanning/parsing/etc) can be bought of the shelf.But it remain a very nice text, to give you an valuable insight in how a compiler could be implemented.

Good book, but when I buy 'new' I don't want it damaged. This was the replacement order, and Amazon shipped in exactly the same way.

This book lays out the compiler's source code in Web (think Knuth), in which instead of seeing an entire program, you see a small fragment, and notes to look up the rest on a different page. In my opinion, this makes the book nearly impossible to read.In its defense, however, the book addresses many of the engineering concerns with writing a compiler, such as data structures or memory management strategies. This is cool.Also lacking in this book is a good description of advanced optimization techniques and modern intermediate representations.