Hasnain says:

Such a great read on the grind and hustling needed to publish a book.

This specific book in particular is a magnificent piece of art - and I've only read the first 2 chapters in depth. Waiting for the paperback edition to come out so I can internalize this. I highly recommend it for folks interested in PL/compilers, and as the HN commenters say, this should probably become a standard textbook at some point.

The author's prior book, Game Programming Patterns, was hands down one of the best software engineering books I've ever read. I'm fairly confident that this will top that book.

"My main overarching goal of the book is to pass on that feeling, to get readers to understand there’s no magic in there and nothing keeping them out. To nail that conceit, I wanted to include every single line of code used by the interpreters in the book. No parser generators, nothing left as an exercise for the reader. If you type in all of the code in the book, you get two complete, working interpreters. No tricks.

So not only did I need to break these two interpreters into chapters, I needed to do it without any cheating. I wanted a hard guarantee that at the end of each chapter, you had a program that you could type in, compile, run, and do something with. I knew I wouldn’t be able to verify this manually, so it was time to create some tools."

Posted on 2020-04-07T03:32:17+0000