Steve Yegge has a posting about Rich Programmer Food, which boils down to “if you know how compilers work, you can become heap big powerful programmer.” (I find most of Steve’s non-fiction to be interesting reading. The fiction and allegories I can never read all the way through.)
I asked Steve if he had any particular resources to recommend, and he didn’t have a “go here for enlightenment” pointer (short of “write your own language, and you’ll eventually have to learn everything you need to know”), but here are some books and things that Steve and others have recommended to me. I have not read most of the books, so apologies if you get them and they end up sucking.
- CS 654 : Intro to Compilers, curriculum from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
- Programming Language Pragmatics, the text for the above course. (I’m currently reading it. Pretty good so far)
- The Dragon Book, Second Edition
- Engineering a Compiler
- Essentials of Programming Languages
- Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation.
