a good introductory compiler book

I dislike most compiler books because they don't *explain* how parsing
techniques work, they merely prove that parsing techniques do indeed
work. I don't find this helpful. I find most of compiling to be fairly
straightforward, except for parsing, which had seemed to be black magic,
particularly since it is usually explained amid a flurry of Greek
letters. Aho, Hopcroft & Ullman are fairly bad at this, though the new
Dragon Book looks a little better at quick glance (I understand that the
proliferation of Greek is Ullman's influence; I have been told that Aho
and Hopcroft can explain in English).


Then I found a wonderful book: Understanding and Writing Compilers
by Richard Bornat, Macmillan Computer Science Series, ISBN 0 333 21732 2.
It's clearly not a book for compiler professionals, but it fills a
gap in the introductory compiler book market. I have yet to see another
book that *explains* how parsing works. (The book was printed on a
Diablo printer and so cannot contain any Greek.)


The major defect of the book is that its figures contain many errors,
but I have an on-line errata list (which I have been meaning to send the
author) which I will supply on request.


Geoff Collyer utzoo!utstat!geoff, utstat.toronto.{edu,cdn}!geoff
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