Compilers - Principles, Techniques and Tools

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View books by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, Jeffrey D. Ullman.

Rather unsatisfied - Rated
If you want to start creating your own compiler (for an existing or a new language) this book is unsuited. In 800 pages you get some background with lots of references but you won't be able to really MAKE a compiler.

For those people: get a copy of Compiler Construction by Niklaus Wirth. In 100 pages Professor Wirth shares more knowledge and you will be able to MAKE compilers, rather than UNDERSTAND them.

A must have - Rated
This book is a bible for compiler study and development, one of the best references available.
It starts by explaining what is a compiler and how it works and gives an example of a simple compiler before getting to each phase in detail.
It really is a very good book, and I don't give it 5 stars only because it is not very clear, sometimes the examples are confusing and not very well explained (LR Parsers for example are very hard to follow if you don't have other references).
If you are interested in understanding how a compiler works, this book is ideal and you'll be very satisfied, but if you plan to develop a compiler this book will "only" give you the (very important) theoretical grounds.

a favourite of mine - Rated
looks like such a weedy book on first glance, especially next to my
knuth boxset! but the depth is quite astounding. the amount devoted to icode, code generation and optimization is impressive in
the latter chapters. this book is a little mathematical and
abstract and maybe a little off putting to someone looking for a step by step recipe for a compiler, but i tell you, suck it up
and learn the maths. you will find it well worth the investment...

Well pitched Introduction to compilers - Rated
In my opinion this book is excelently pitched, it is interesting to read, and requires some thought to fully appriciate the implications of some parts of it, but it's not boring by any means, and it's not massivly over my head either. The book is fairly old, and the examples seem to revlove around pascal quite a lot, but that isn't really a hinderence, anyone with a reasonable understanding of computers and languages should be able to pick this up and still make sense even if you've never heard of fortran or algol before ever. Highly recommended as an introduction to the theory of compilers.

The reference book ... depending on your needs - Rated
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.