Title: Only useful as a reference.
Review: I used this book in an undergraduate course in compiler design and found it overall to be almost useless. This book only makes sense if you already understand compiler design. The authors frequently throw out dozens of terms that they don't bother to define for several hundred pages. With minimal effort they could explain exactly what a symbol-table is used for or at least give some idea before giving an in-depth analysis of issues in symboltable design but instead they inundate the reader in terminology (to scare off the weak-willed I think) and let the explanation appear 250 pages later.With that said the book does cover alot. It has lots of examples (that are probably the only parts that make sense) and talks about lots of important language specific issues. Going back to it the book is a useful reference. But the parts I didn't learn about still don't make any sense. That's why this book is an okay reference but a miserable learning device.
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