[laichzeit0]

I remember picking this book up at the university library in my second year because I had seen it in the movie “Hackers” and the cover looked really cool. I distinctly remember the parsing chapters especially recursive descent parsing. It was one of those light bulb “oh, this is how you do it” moments. Well worth spending a few weekends playing with that book, even if it’s somewhat dated, its like SICP in a sense more of a “mind expansion” device than anything else.

[jobhdez]

SICP was a great book too. It taught me to program, and bent my mind. I just marveled at the Beauty of it a few times.

[Solvency]

I know nothing about compiler design or compiler parsing. How broadly applicable are the chapters on parsing? Will it make the average programmer instantly more equipped to, say, write a robust JSON parser?

[kaba0]

I’m not convinced that it would actually be particularly good as a parsing book either.

But the average programmer should just use a CSV parser lib, why reinvent the wheel? For custom tasks learning about ANTLR is much more productive (a good parser generator)

[jobhdez]

I think you would have the knowledge to build a parser generator that then you can use to write a parser for json. But you can also also just learn how to use a parser generator. You’ll have to know a little bit about regular expressions for this

[sanxiyn]

Yes.