[darnton]

I bought this book as a "Rough Cut" a few months ago. If you want a very high-level introduction to the field of DSLs this book may be for you but don't expect to be able to do much useful after reading it. It really is just the 50,000 ft view.

I was disappointed because I wanted to get my hands dirty and so I got The Definitive ANTLR Reference a day or two later. While it has nothing like the breadth of Fowler's DSLs it has enough depth to be very useful.

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/tpantlr/the-definitive-antlr-...

[Confusion]

As a newcomer to writing DSL's, I found the book very valuable as an introduction to all the intricacies that can be involved in writing a useful, nicely integrating, DSL. The abstraction of the 'semantic model', which Fowler advocates strongly, has proven indispensable, allowing me to easily build GUI-based DSL editor for an initially completely text-based DSL, without changing a single bit in the code executing the parsed DSL.

Incidentally, this book and the definitive ANTLR reference are exactly the two books that appeared on my radar when searching for literature in DSL's.