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A book about how to write an interpreter from scratch
Hello,
My name is Mehmet. I am the author of "Practical Interpreter Construction".
I am not writing for promoting my book.
It is a more story and a contra attitude than just announcing yet another book about compilers and interpreters.
There are some books teaching compilers. When I decide to write an interpreter from scratch, I first googled about compiler books.
I bought some of them but liked none of them because of the heavy theory they include. Also, I don't think that a practical programmer needs to read an even difficult to carry book.
After some struggle and seek and then cancel, I found out James Hague's blog post exactly about what books to read if one wants to write an interpreter or compiler, here it is:
http://prog21.dadgum.com/30.html
As he suggests, I have read Jack Crenshaw's famous "Let's Build a Compiler" text, http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw
It really is amazing text about compilers.
I have learned a lot by reading Mr. Crenshaw's text.
Despite it is a gem and it does teach a lot, there is something that puts off many in his text: it is target platform is Motorola 68K, besides, it does not teach much about writing an interpreter. It is more a compiler book.
Then afterwards, I decided to write a book about writing an interpreter from scratch.
There is parsing and interpreting expressions, strings, code comments, variables, arrays, while loops, if-else case and functions in the book.
It is heavy-theory free and a practical book. You don't have to be a computer science student to read it.
Any programmer can read it.
I hope I will help many programmers to write their own interpreters and learn how interpreters work.
It is a very useful mental process and it really is fun!
Here is the book link on Leanpub.com:
http://leanpub.com/pic
Greetings,
Mehmet Emin Coskun.
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- bbayer 11y agoFirst of all congrats for your release. As a Turkish computer engineer my only suggestion is to release a Turkish version and talk to major publishers. Turkish computer science sources don't go beyond from application tutorials. We really need quality content to teach people real computer science. Even computer science students graduate from school without having single idea of what automata is. So please make it Turkish and get it released.
- mehmetcoskun 11y agoSure, why not to make it in Turkish. Thank you for the feedback.