Title: Hello,<p>I have seen a lot of people on the internet say that the dragon book is horrible book to learn compilers from.<p>well, I have read some of the second edition of the dragon book and I think it is a great book. The main criticism is that its too focused on parsing. Thats just like 5 chapters. I skipped these and went straight into the intermediate language, code generation, and optimizing chapters.<p>These chapters give a detailed account of things such as register allocation, instruction selection, and instruction scheduling. The optimizing chapters are also good.<p>im not claiming im an expert compiler person. I am not but compilers is something i want to learn and so i gave the dragon book a try and i really liked it.<p>more importantly the dragon book made me realize that compilers are mathematical systems in a way. the ast is tree and trees have mathematical properties but graphs are needed for register allocation, dataflow analysis for optimization. optimization is math problem.<p>So i think this book gave me a better understanding of the field and it made appreciate compilers.<p>i&#x27;d say if youre interested in compilers you can start with &quot;essence of compilation&quot; by dr. siek and get some experience writing compilers and then read the dragon book.<p>i just wanted to share my experience. i think the dragon book is a great book.
Upvote: