alt Hacker NewsI started with the dragon book, and I found it to be a good introductory text.
A lot of people say the dragon book is difficult, so I suppose there must be something there. But I don't see what it is, I thought it was quite accessible.
I'm curious, what parts/aspects of the dragon book make it difficult to start with?
It's been a few years since I worked with the dragon book, but I think the most common complaint was that it starts with like 350 pages on parser theory: generating bottom-up and top-down parsers from context free grammars, optimizing lexers for systems that don't have enough RAM to store an entire source file, etc... before ever getting to what most people who want to write a compiler care about (implementing type inference, optimizing intermediate representations, generating assembly code). Of course parsing is important, and very interesting to some. But there's a reason most modern resources skip over all of that and just make the reader write a recursive descent parser.