I have the C version, and I personally found it easier going than the Dragon Book. As with the other books in the series, the beginning chapters dealing with t

I have the C version, and I personally found it easier going than the Dragon Book. As with the other books in the series, the beginning chapters dealing with the lexer an the parser are very mathematical - but the parts actually dealing with emitting bytecode are quite practical in nature. I ended up using the lexx/yacc tutorials to give me a grounding in parsing, without worrying too much about the mathematical basis for it, and then used the Appel book for everything after having derived an AST.