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Twenty-First Century Compilers

According to amazon.com, Ravi, Sethi, and Ullman are (finally!!!) issuing a revision to the series of "Dragon Books"; this one is entitled Twenty-First Century Compilers. If amazon is to be believed, it should be published by the end of the year. Monica Lam (of Stanford) has been added to the author team as well.

Has anybody seen an advanced copy of the book? I know that Alfred Aho has been using it in his classes at Columbia, but I've seen little information on it otherwise (beyond the summaries at amazon and on Ullman's home page). Any comments on the new material?

And the important question (this may be a closely-guarded secret):

What color is the dragon on the cover?

Inquiring minds, as they say, wanna know.

By Scott Johnson at 2005-09-09 18:26 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 13071 reads

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About time too

Ullman's home page says:

There will be a new edition of the Dragon book published by Addison-Wesley, sometime in 2005. Monica Lam is joining the author team for this project. The revision will include an updating of our favorite topics, and material on such subjects as compiling for parallel machines, garbage collection, on-the-fly compiling, support for objects, compiler technology in verification and security, for example.

That all sounds very encouraging; as does the fact that he's written a book on ML in the meantime...

By Dominic Fox at Fri, 2005-09-09 20:55 | login or register to post comments

Good news

The ML book isn't very interesting, but it's good to hear about the Dragon book.

By Ehud Lamm at Fri, 2005-09-09 21:15 | login or register to post comments

Read Elements of ML book not long ago

I actually liked it, but it's strictly a book for those who want to learn the ML syntax - no involved examples and just pure syntax. Liked it better than ML for the Working Programmer which alternates between teaching ML and trying to be a general introduction to computer science.

By Chris Rathman at Sat, 2005-09-10 04:42 | login or register to post comments

Nice book

It's a nice book, butnot very advanced, and doesn't really offer a real introduction to the FP mind set.

I seem to remember a lengthier review here from a couple of years ago.

By Ehud Lamm at Sat, 2005-09-10 11:57 | login or register to post comments

Just to make the amazon entry

Just to make the amazon entry only one click away:
Twenty-First Century Compilers

By Niels Hoogeveen at Sat, 2005-09-10 14:00 | login or register to post comments

release cancelled?

I just received the following message from Amazon:

We are sorry to report that the release of the following item has been
cancelled:

Alfred V. Aho, et al "21st Century Compilers"

I didn't see any reason for the cancellation any where on the web, including Prof. Aho's page. Any ideas?

By shahbaz at Sat, 2005-12-03 03:06 | login or register to post comments

check the aw site

The book has a site at aw here.
The chapters 5-11 are online viewable (via flash).

Well, its name is not "21st Century Compilers", but Monica Lam is amongst the authors; thus, this should be the book.

By kabel at Sat, 2005-12-03 06:55 | login or register to post comments

Release Date Inaccurate

I was told recently by some book reps that the Amazon release date is known to be inaccurate. They expect the book to be released in the first half of 2006.

By Hajime Inoue at Sat, 2005-12-03 21:31 | login or register to post comments

Online Chapters

You can view chapters 5-11 online with Flash until January 1st.

Online Chapters

Specifically, the actual pages exist at locations in this form:

http://media.pearsoncmg.com/aw/aw_aho_compilers_2/dragon5/swf/miller13/0001.swf

Where 'dragon5' to 'dragon11' are the chapter, and 0001.swf - 0XXX.swf are the page numbers. This may be handy if you wish to cache a copy for offline reading.

By Bryan Turner at Mon, 2005-12-05 21:42 | login or register to post comments

That legal?

This is copyrighted text, and I suspect that once the review period passes, the new chapters will not be accessible without payment. I'm hoping for the chapters to be eventually published in dead tree form (though having both printed and online forms available is the best--online is easier for reference; printed is easier for straight-through reading).

By Scott Johnson at Mon, 2005-12-05 23:15 | login or register to post comments

Legal? Yes.

Yes, it is as legal to manually download the files as it is for your web browser to cache them automatically. The Flash tool does not download all the pages unless you manually click 'next page' each time. Also, the viewer cannot be resized to allow comfortable reading, nor does it allow deep zooming. I find this very annoying and decided to fix it.

The individual pages are viewable in a web browser at any resolution, and can be zoomed in for closer inspection (graphics, etc).

Unfortunately the flash viewer also does not allow searching, nor page-range printing. I spent some time looking for tools to correct this, but in the end I decided it wasn't worth the value-add I would get from the end result. Why not just release PDFs?

My understanding is that the online version will be part of an additional package which can be purchased separately, probably as a differentiator, or for teachers to use in class, etc. I think online publishing is increasingly valuable for academic texts esp. with respect to searching (I use Amazon's "Search Inside" feature quite a bit).

By Bryan Turner at Tue, 2005-12-06 00:38 | login or register to post comments