Cover artist ? Publication date 1977 ISBN 0-201-00022-9 Page count 614 | Language English Pages 614 Originally published 1977 | |
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Similar Jeffrey Ullman books, Compiler books | ||
Principles of Compiler Design, by Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman, is a classic textbook on compilers for computer programming languages.
It is often called the "dragon book" 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". 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 book also contains the entire code for making a compiler.
The back cover offers the original inspiration of the cover design: 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, little of which had, at that time, been seen outside the Laboratories.