Principles of Compiler Design

Principles of Compiler Design, by Alfred Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman, is a classic textbook on compilers for computer programming languages.

It is often called the "dragon book"[1] and its cover depicts a knight and a dragon in battle; the dragon is green, and labelled "Complexity of Compiler Construction", while the knight wields a lance labeled "LALR parser generator". The book may be called the "green dragon book" to distinguish it from its successor, Aho, Sethi & Ullman's Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, which is the "red dragon book"[1]. The second edition of Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools added a fourth author, Monica S. Lam, and the dragon became purple; hence becoming the "purple dragon book."

The back cover offers a different viewpoint on the problem - the dragon is replaced by windmills, and the knight is Don Quixote.

The book was published by Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-00022-9. The acknowledgments mention that the book was entirely typeset at Bell Labs using troff on the Unix operating system, which at that time had been little seen outside the Labs.

References

  1. ^ a b Mad Macz (January 2002). Internet Underground: The Way of the Hacker. PageFree Publishing, Inc.. p. 219. ISBN 978-1-930252-53-0. http://books.google.com/books?id=Q5OHEW8_gysC&pg=PA219. Retrieved 21 October 2011.