If you want to learn to apply grammars and parsers in practice I recommend the antlr parser-generator: http://www.antlr.org/ http://www.antlr.org/ It can not

If you want to learn to apply grammars and parsers in practice I recommend the antlr parser-generator: http://www.antlr.org/ http://www.antlr.org/ It can not only do the basic text->tree parsing from a file describing the grammar, but will also allow to specify additional grammars for traversing the generated tree and executing arbitrary code in your language of choice as particular nodes are recognized. I built a little compiler in it some years ago, I had a Xpl.g grammar file for parsing the program text and creating the abstract syntax tree, a SemanticAnalysis.g grammar file for doing a first pass through the tree, annotating it with additional information, filling the symbol table, checking semantic correctness and then finally CodeGeneration.g for emitting JVM bytecode using the annotated tree. The code for this is still on Github: https://github.com/jaroslawr/xpl/tree/509120e66e23aac8493414ce5aa7e8079f6ff7ce https://github.com/jaroslawr/xpl/tree/509120e66e23aac8493414... There is a simpler example using the same functionalities described on the ANTLR wiki: http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/ANTLR3/Simple+tree-based+interpeter http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/ANTLR3/Simple+tree-based+i... I used the ANTLR reference book when learning it, but now there is also a real introductory manual: http://pragprog.com/book/tpantlr2/the-definitive-antlr-4-reference http://pragprog.com/book/tpantlr2/the-definitive-antlr-4-ref... http://pragprog.com/book/tpdsl/language-implementation-patterns http://pragprog.com/book/tpdsl/language-implementation-patte... I also used the Dragon Book and "Programming Language Pragmatics" for theory, both great books and PLP certainly deserves to be better known.