Dragon Book

Steve Yegge:

If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work. If you're not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don't know how they work.

The rest of the article is pure Stevey.

This post hit close to home since I didn't take a compiler class as an undergraduate so the summer before I started graduate school I bought the Dragon Book, read it, and then wrote a small compiler.

As you can guess, I'm a blast at parties.

Red. I know you were going to ask, and the Dragon Book I used was the red one. There is, of course, a wikipedia entry on the dragon books, which explains that there's two Dragon Books, the first edition and the second edition, which are referred to respectively as 'red' and 'purple'.

Anyway, that was a formative experience, and in every single job since I've created at least one DSL, compiler, interpreter, or parser; and typically more than one.