It's been two decades since I took the origins of this course at UC Berkeley. Understanding the material from this course (and the Dragon Book in general) shoul

It's been two decades since I took the origins of this course at UC Berkeley. Understanding the material from this course (and the Dragon Book in general) should change the way you think about many forms of data processing. I think this topic is absolutely foundational to a well-rounded CS education. It's important to understand a little about tool-building rather than just tool-use if you want to master your craft. I haven't reviewed his new syllabus in depth, but even 20 years ago, Alex had reduced the focus on parsing compared to more traditional syllabi based on the Dragon Book. You were expected to do some homework and self-study to learn the basic parsing and lexing concepts. The reason for COOL was to get you into the other compiler-construction topics sooner to get some breadth of exposure to concepts like abstract syntax trees, semantic checking, type systems, intermediate languages, code-generation, and the rough idea of runtime systems and ABIs. Taken together with an operating systems course, these are really two different examples of systems engineering concepts. You should be able to take away not just some vertical silo of knowledge only applicable to "building a compiler" or "writing an OS". You should be able to fuse these concepts into a richer understanding of how to decompose and engineer complex systems given a range of specialized and more general-purpose requirements. Another facet of this can be found in courses focused more on database construction and storage, but this starts to veer out of the introductory space. Unfortunately, most introductory database courses focus too much on using a database and writing applications instead of on understanding how they work and what the engineering tradeoffs actually are.