"...for all the claims it makes in the preface about being practical instead of theoretical..." It's important to view this book in the context of its time. At

"...for all the claims it makes in the preface about being practical instead of theoretical..." It's important to view this book in the context of its time. At that time, there were no books that showed you both the theory and complete running code for even this much. The compiler books (Dragon, 1st ed.; etc.) showed toy snippets but not a full lexer, parser, and code generator. There were only the articles in Dr. Dobb's about Small-C to show the way. So, at the time, Holub's book was a godsend. It married theory and implementation in a way that simply had not been done before. Hanson's and Fraser's 1995 book on a retargetable C compiler was a similar milestone, although it came out several years later. After those two landmark books, explanations of full compiler implementations were no longer a rarity.