[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.”