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Title: good but concise
Review: This text may not have the academic depth of the "dragon book" (Aho et al.), but it provides concise, professional, balanced coverage of the essential concepts of syntax analysis, code generation, code optimization, and the like. Also, in distancing itself from certain gory implementational details, the book also keeps its distance from the almost de rigueur UNIX bent of Aho and its ilk. After all, there are other tools in the world than yacc and lex: indeed, I found yacc to be quite problematic when (some years ago) building an instrumentation tool for Model 204 User Language, a beast more syntactically bizarre and outside-the-box than even FORTRAN 66 (now, can you imagine that, sonny boy?).
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