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Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools

Alfred V. Aho, Monica S. Lam, Ravi Sethi, Jeffrey D. Ullman

25 people recommended it in 10 threads, 2011–2022.

4 commenters pushed back on it — worth reading the threads.

What people on Hacker News said

beat
It really changed my whole way of thinking about a fundamental class of programming problems.

on HN, 2017

DoofusOfDeath
The "dragon book" takes a lot of the mystery out of compilers. That's somewhat helpful when writing code that needs to be fast. It's super helpful if you want to work with compiler-related technologies such as LLVM.

on HN, 2017

timtadh
As someone who has quite a few books on compilers, program analysis, type theory, etc... I find the Dragon book an irreplaceable reference to this day. It has a breadth of content shared by very few other books.

on HN, 2017

joshAg
Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman—also known as "The Red Dragon Book".

on HN, 2013

T-R
Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools - Aho, Lam, Sethi, and Ullman (a.k.a. "Dragon Book")

on HN, 2011

nikcub
Second is the famous 'Dragon Book', Compilers: Principals, Techniques and Tools[3] and the associated course which is 6.035[4]

on HN, 2011

Where it comes up