Review by Sean Osullivan for Writing Compilers and Interpreters
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There are several things you should know about this book:1) The book implements a top-down or recursive-descent parser, as opposed to a standard shift-reduce parser. This is *very* important, as lex/yacc, Visual Parse++, and other parsing tools are efficient shift-reduce macines. Thus, the parser isn’t really portable. Even so, I did find the the symbol table design that’s used by the parser to be critical for what I needed.2) The printed material is mostly (say 70%) code listings, thus even though the book is a whopping 838 pages, it would be much slimmer with fewer listings. The code is downloadable from the pusblisher’s (Wiley) site.3) The 30% of text and figures that are in the book could be much more insightful. For example, Chapter 11 – the interactive debugger should at least have some description (screenshots perhaps) of how to use the debugger. (Hint, the commands end with a semi-colon.)4) Even though this book is C++ oriented, it doesn’t use standard containers like linked lists, or trees (maps/sets). The classes have pointers in them that makes the class also act as a its own node in a list or whatever. This makes the design much more confusing than it needs to be. 5) The symbol table implementation has heavy circular dependencies. Quite honestly I don’t know of a better implementation (yet). This does, however pose a problem if you’ll need to extend the design (to use STL containers, to self-serialize, etc.)The book has been a godsend, but I couldn’t honestly let the 4 and 5 star reviews sit unchallenged. If I had known the above sooner, I could have saved quite a few weekends.I think an Ideal Writing Compilers book would come bundled with a thirty day version of Visual Parse++ or Dr. Parse, and work from there.

Review by gary.bell@cad.shorts.co.uk for Writing Compilers and Interpreters
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The book describes step-by-step how the author would write a compiler for PASCAL. It could do with some more explanations of the logic behind some of the decisions,as it tends to quickly explain what the following C++ code does,before launching into pages of (well written) programming. If you have been tasked to write a specific compiler, then this book is probably what you want to get. If you are wanting to further your knowledge of the art, then you would be better looking at some of the more weighty volumes.

Review by Hugh K. Boyd for Writing Compilers and Interpreters
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I bought this book in 1996 when I was a CS graduate student. The course text was the traditional “dragon book” which is a complete nigthmare to understand. I read this book in hopes of better understanding how compilers and interpreters are implemented and to this day I feel like I hit the jackpot.The book focuses primarily on the practical implementation of language interpreters and compilers and includes the code (C++) for a full featured Pascal interpreter (not just a minimal implementation that interprets a few statements). The author walks the reader through each class virtually line by line and presents the material in a way that any intermediate level C++ developer can easily understand.Notwithstanding the pragmatic focus of this book, it also provides excellent treatment of the theory of compiler design. While it is at least 5 years old, I still keep this book in my library.

Review by Sandeep Gupta for Writing Compilers and Interpreters
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This text fully accomplishes its goal of providing a simple
and practical introduction to this subject. Students and
self-taught programmers having difficulty understanding
compiler theory from texts like the “dragon book” will find
this book very useful in getting started. Working thru all the well written C++ code also provides
excerise in polishing your C++ programming skills, beyond the
first class introducing C++. Though there is a lot of code,
I feel there is significant “added value” in the presentation
of code segments and textual descriptions which helps novices
grasp implementation of the concepts being discussed. As every author knows, books like all other projects can be
refined further. One enhancement to this book is that
every chapter should include a (small) section dedicated
discussing the theoretical concepts without any reference
to the code. Alternative approaches and advanced concepts
could be mentioned here with a word about using simple
techniques to stay in line with the goal of the book.

Review by for Writing Compilers and Interpreters
Rating:
This book gives a very detailed discussion of how to write a compiler using C++. As such it could function as a supplementary textbook for a course in compilers or as one for an advanced course in C++. The author describes in detail every step of the way, and it makes interesting and fun reading. Buy it: it is well worth the price.