lex & yacc, 2nd Edition
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Author: Tony Mason, John Levine, Doug Brown
List Price: $29.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 1565920007
Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates (02 October, 1992)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 28,108
Average Customer Rating: 4.04 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 4 out of 5
This acts as a Helping hand for compiler developrs
Firstly there are not many books on Lex & Yacc.
Unix programming by Kernighan & Pike provides
some necessary information but it is not sufficient
to write a complex parser or scanner. In these circumstances
this book acts like a God given gift for compiler developers.The examples which introduce the tools are very good.
But the theory behind these examples is not well explained.
Probably NFA/DFA concepts add more strenght to the
book. Adding more and more concepts and examples
will make this as a unique book in the Market. Many guys who desire jobs as compiler developers
follow this book. So some contemporary examples that
I expect from future editions of this book are
A) Parsing a Gate level design
B) A small simulator which simulates an analog/digital design
C) An assembler etc
D) Relational algebra tutor etc. Hope the authors can consider this request.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Not good, but beggars can't be choosers
There is too much repetition of basic ideas in the first few chapters of the book, and not enough coverage of more advanced topics (like how to use marker nonterminals, how to use $<>$ constructs, etc).The discussion of shift/reduce and reduce/reduce conflicts in chaper 8 is pretty good though and would make a fine introduction for a beginner wanting to learn /basic/ concepts. Good error handling is definitely a black art, but I still would have liked to have been given more information about it in chapter 9. The examples were also a bit too soft. Chapters 4 and 5 have some interesting (and highly unusual)examples for scanning and parsing applications, but they do not show off many of the advanced capabilites of lex and yacc. What this book really needs are couple of examples that demonstrate how to overcome classic scanning and parsing horrors (like how to do type checking in, say, C); a chapter like this instead of one of chapters 4 or 5 would be great. Even today lex and yacc are very important tools in the computer scientist's toolkit. They were designed 25 (or so) years ago, but /real/ documentation is still nonexistant. This means that unfortunately, this book is one of the best. I think that the FSF's Bison manual is much better value for money. It also does not cover advanced topics in enough depth, but what is does explain, it explains quite clearly.
Rating: 4 out of 5
good book, but can be better
The book is fairly aged at internet time and should be replaced by a newer editions.flex and bison/byacc are easier to find as they are free. They need a bit more spaces. Also, people read a book want to spend less time reading the on-line manuals on screen. The C part of the examples are not paradigm work. Uninitialized pointers are casually used and memory are some times never freed. Lex and yacc seems best with well-defined classroom or smaller projects. I am interested to learn how to solve the more complicated real world problems.
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