Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools - Definition and Overview

The book cover showing a knight and dragon

Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools is a famous computer science textbook by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman about compiler construction. Although several years have passed since its publication, it is widely regarded as the classic definitive compiler technology text.

It is known as the dragon book because its cover depicts a knight and a dragon in battle. Oldtimers call this the "red dragon book" to distinguish it from Aho & Ullman's Principles of Compiler Design (1977), which is the "green dragon book" because the dragon on its cover is green.

Topics covered include:

• Compiler structure
• Lexical analysis (including regular expressions and finite automata)
• Syntax analysis (including context-free grammars, LL parsers, bottom-up parsers, and LR parsers)
• Syntax directed translation
• Type checking (including type conversions and polymorphism)
• Run-time environment (including parameter passing, symbol tables, and storage allocation)
• Code generation (including intermediate code generation)
• Code optimization

Further reading

• Aho, Sethi, Ullman, Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools, Addison-Wesley, 1986. ISBN 0201100886
• Buy via abebooks.com (http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?imagefield.x=46&an=aho&tn=compilers&imagefield.y=12)

Errata

There are enough people complaining about lack of an Errata page despite errors found on this book. This entry is a request to we start such a page on our own.

See also

• Computer language