Turing Award goes to Aho and Ullman
I never took a compilers course in college and came to regret that. Ten years later I started reading the Dragon Book, and realized how I could trivially modify the NFA regular expression search algorithm to solve a problem I’d seen in digital forensics and eDiscovery. The writing is extremely clear and easy to follow, and I now tell all interns to be sure to take a compilers course before they graduate. Well-earned!