Absolutely. I became interested in compilers while in graduate school in the 70's and I spent many many hours studying Aho and Ulman's two volumes work on comp

Absolutely. I became interested in compilers while in graduate school in the 70's and I spent many many hours studying Aho and Ulman's two volumes work on compilers that preceded their Dragon book [1]. The first volume was all about parsing, mostly LR (bottom-up) parsing and it's variations. These books resembled math books more than CS books. A few years before, Knuth had invented LR parsing [2] and I think that CS departments were still enthralled by the fascinating formal theory discovered around parsing. Aho and Ulman's Dragon Books on compiling are much more balanced. I was fascinated by the formal methods that could be used to specify a language's grammar and then the automated generation of a parser from the grammar. I even went so far as to write a LR parser generator in Fortran IV back then. Once I got into industry and was working in a group doing real-world compiler development I realized that there is a lot more than just lexical scanning and parsing going on in a compiler, it's tool chain, and runtime. Teaching compilers backwards sounds like a really good approach for students learning compilers. On a slightly broader but related topic, many programmers have never been exposed to assembly language, parameter passing mechanisms or how a program turns into a process. Anyone interested in system level programming in the real-world could benefit from Bryant and O'Hallaron's Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective [3]. This is not an easy book, but it is excellent and suitable for undergraduate CS students in their 3rd or 4th year. [1] Aho and Ulman, Compiling (Theory of Parsing, Translation and Compiling), Vol 1 (1972) & Vol 2 (1973), Prentice Hall. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LR_parser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LR_parser [3] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspective-2nd/dp/0136108040 https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspect...