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by marai2 3448 days ago
This book was my greatest buy ever! I once went to Fry's electronics to their book section - my expectation was to find only popular books there, when lo and behold, I see this book on compilers. I turn it over to look at the price tag, thinking I'll have to shell out something like $80 for the book and to my shock and surprise the tag says,... wait for it... $0.01 That's right one cent! At first I think this is some kind of prank and somebody peeled off a price sticker from some discounted stale candy or something and stuck it on this book. I'm of half a mind to see if I can buy slip this book by the store checker and have them just scan the one cent price tag and not to a double take. But my concsience gets the better of me and I walk up to a store clerk point out the one cent price tag and ask them to do a real price check so I can find out the fair price. The clerk looks up the book in his computer and says, nope that is the correct price in their system! So I bought "Engineering a Compiler 2nd Ed. By Cooper & Torczon" for $0.01! My greatest book buy ever!
1 comments

Wow, that's awesome! I picked up mine second hand at a textbook distributor for the equivalent of about $30.

For anyone interested in other books on compiler construction, I would recommend these:

- "The Basics of Compiler Design" by Torben Mogensen

- "Modern Compiler Implementation in C" by Andrew Appel (ML and Java versions available too)

- "Modern Compiler Design" by Grune, Bal et al.

The Dragon Book is obviously infamous for this topic, but I would recommend covering at least two slightly more basic texts before taking it on.

Try Principles of Program Analysis by Nielson & Nielson. Uber hardcore and beautiful approaches to static analysis and optimization, on a very general mathematical framework.