[pbiggar]

Meh. It's SSA treatment is poor. The dataflow chapter is OK. The points-to chapter isn't great (especially for someone so into it). BDDs and datalog are very poorly addressed, especially when trying to seek more information of Lam/Whaley's work on them.

Skip the whole Dragon Book, read Cooper/Torczon or Appel.

[dlo]

I agree that its treatment of SSA is scanty. Muchnick, which I have started poking at, is much more thorough: The Dragon Book does go into what SSA is, but it does not tell you how to compute it while Muchnick does. However, I imagine it must have been a deliberate decision since Ullman et al. go into dominance frontiers quite readily shortly thereafter.

I admit that I skipped over the book's treatment of points-to analysis since I read the original papers by Lam and Whaley on it. Obviously, I can't speak for its treatment in the book, but I found the papers to be excellent. And indeed, one of them won a Best Paper award.