[dashtiarian]

For a start you should, you should buy the latest version of the Dragon Book and then put it on the shelf.

Then you should get a copy of Modern Compiler implementation in ML. I love the Crafting Interpreters book, and also the Writing A Compiler In Go book; but they will not satisfy any person with undergraduate CS education.

[moregrist]

For a contrary point of view, I don’t think the Dragon book actually holds up that well.

All of the front-end parsing stuff is good, but heavily biased toward LALR parsing, which is rarely used in production compilers these days because it’s really hard to get good error messaging. There’s also a lot of tooling that can help these days.

But where it really falls down is the backend part. Parsing is just not where you’ll spend most of your time. Once you parse you usually need to translate the parse tree (often an AST but not always) into some other representation.

I found the Appel books (Modern Compiler Implementation in <language>) to be much better at that part. I still own a Dragon book (an older one), but tend to refer to my Appel book a lot more when working on compiler-y things.

[steveklabnik]

I read your parent’s “and then put it on the shelf” as a cheeky way of saying “don’t read it.”

[daemin]

I would completely agree.

From memory (because I left my copy of the Dragon book in another country) the book describes very well the first stages of compiler construction, describing the fundamentals of what Lex/Flex and Yacc/Bison do.

Right now for a compiler I'm writing I have used the Crafting Interpreters book and find it very useful. It's basic but can carry you through a project, and a decent reference for someone who took a Compiler Construction course about 20 years ago.