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Robert Nystrom
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Crafting Interpreters Kindle Edition

by Robert Nystrom (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 591 ratings
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Despite using them every day, most software engineers know little about how programming languages are designed and implemented. For many, their only experience with that corner of computer science was a terrifying "compilers" class that they suffered through in undergrad and tried to blot from their memory as soon as they had scribbled their last NFA to DFA conversion on the final exam.

That fearsome reputation belies a field that is rich with useful techniques and not so difficult as some of its practitioners might have you believe. A better understanding of how programming languages are built will make you a stronger software engineer and teach you concepts and data structures you'll use the rest of your coding days. You might even have fun.

This book teaches you everything you need to know to implement a full-featured, efficient scripting language. You’ll learn both high-level concepts around parsing and semantics and gritty details like bytecode representation and garbage collection. Your brain will light up with new ideas, and your hands will get dirty and calloused.

Starting from main(), you will build a language that features rich syntax, dynamic typing, garbage collection, lexical scope, first-class functions, closures, classes, and inheritance. All packed into a few thousand lines of clean, fast code that you thoroughly understand because you wrote each one yourself.
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  1. Print length
    1192 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    27 July 2021
  4. File size
    18134 KB
  5. Page Flip
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  6. Word Wise
    Not Enabled
  7. Enhanced typesetting
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  8. See all details
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Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09BCCVLCL
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Genever Benning (27 July 2021)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 18134 KB
  • Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 1192 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 591 ratings

About the author

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Robert Nystrom

Robert Nystrom

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Robert Nystrom has programmed professionally for twenty years, about half of which is in games. During his eight years at Electronic Arts, he worked on behemoths like Madden and smaller titles like Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure. He's shipped games on the PC, GameCube, PS2, XBox, X360, and DS, but is most proud of the tools and shared libraries he created for others to build on. He loves seeing usable, beautiful code magnify the creative ability of others.

Robert lives with his wife and two daughters in Seattle where you are most likely to find him cooking for his friends and plying them with good beer.

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4.8 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from Australia

Ethan Hebden
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
Reviewed in Australia on 22 November 2024
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Great book which is well written and provides a deep understanding.
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Richard Frantz Jr.
5.0 out of 5 stars Useful information for writing a small interpreter
Reviewed in the United States on 29 August 2024
Verified Purchase
A lot of this reminds me of when I studied from the Dragon Book in school, and what I remember is very helpful, but this book is more on a practical tack of actually use it. (Best thing for me was a suggestion that I take as never mind getting the elegant and difficult way of doing what I want and just get started and I can add the hard to use tools later.) Uses examples that seem of trivial use but clear examples and well describes the techniques needed.
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José
5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente! Bem completo na área de compiladores
Reviewed in Brazil on 13 February 2023
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Recebi esse livro super rápido com nota fiscal e tudo certo! Ainda não tive tempo para ler o livro, mas é um produto excelente sobre compiladores.
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Frederic Guerin
5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding and enjoyable!
Reviewed in Canada on 28 July 2022
Verified Purchase
This is a fascinating book in many different ways.

I am myself a teacher and throughout the book I could feel the author
attention and dedication in making this book something you could learn from.
He touches many different aspects of the matter with many great explanations
and without hiding the forest behind the trees, adding a touch of humour and his own illustrations.
He deserves my own job 10 times.

All the code you need to write is in the book. I tried hard to find a mistake, even a typo, but to no avail.
At times you wonder why he is writing the code that way, but then later, you find about it,
so you need to be careful to follow him as much as possible. The problem is that each
chapter ends with some interesting challenges, and if you tackle them in the order they come,
then your code becomes somewhat different from what's in the book and you then need
to figure out how to put that into place in your own code. That is exactly the problem I was confronted with in the Java part of the book, and by chance refrained from doing in the C part.

Another problem is testing your code. Sooner or later you will need to get some certitude about the
things you wrote, even if you follow the author as much as possible, and that means testing it.
I put in place my own tests for the Java part, throwing in many hours of effort.
I then realised the author had build it's own testing framework on his github repo for the book,
and used his framework for testing the C part of the book. The tests are written in Dart, and there is not much documentation into place to instruct you how to run them on a chapter by chapter basis. I had to read the code to figure out how to do it, and adapt the code a little bit to make it run properly under Windows, but I finally succeed. Dart is easy to grasp, but you still need to understand how to install the Dart ecosystem and properly configure it with the package manager.

As for the code itself, the Java part is as you would expect it to be. Functionalities are well segregated in to many classes doing their own things, with proper encapsulation. As for the C part, well, I guess I am not very accostumed to how compiler coders are writing C code. To me, this code seems like a mess. Macros are used extensively. There are many cross-dependecies between files. Of course the author is very knowledgeable and know its art. When doing the NaN boxing at the end of the book (last chapter on optimization) you understand why so much macros to begin with. As for cross-dependencies, I tried to figure out how I could avoid it, but to no avail. I suppose I just need to accept it that way.

No book is perfect, but still, this book is mostly perfect, even in its imperfections. 5 stars.
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Huibert Aalbers
5.0 out of 5 stars De lo mejor que he leído con respecto a intérpretes/compiladores
Reviewed in Mexico on 22 October 2021
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Si alguna vez quisiste saber cómo escribir un intérprete de un lenguaje de programación de (relativamente) alto nivel, este es un gran libro. El autor empieza definiendo el lenguaje que quiere implementar (Lox) y luego desarrollo dos intérpretes para este lenguaje, uno en Java (para entender las bases) y luego otro mucho más rápido en C, pero también más complejo, en C.

Se trata de un libro ameno, escrito por un experto que conoce el tema a fondo y que te permitirá aprender todos los conceptos fundamentales. ¡Altamente recomendado!
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Partime
5.0 out of 5 stars Great content. Not so perfect binding.
Reviewed in India on 10 November 2024
Verified Purchase
This is a very good introductory book to writing compiler, although any advanced work will require comprehensive knowledge on formal languages, type theory, etc. Wish the book was available in hardcover as the glued binding does not look like it would last long them use.
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