Author here! It feels amazing to have this done and live. I'm happy to talk about whatever you might want to know about it. If you're curious how the sausage was made, I wrote a blog post about taking the web book and bringing it to print and ebook here:
> I decided to rewrite the whole build system for the book in Dart. The build script I wrote for my first book was dead simple. Literally a single Python script that took a Markdown file for each book chapter and rendered it to HTML while weaving in the code snippets. The world’s dumbest static site generator. [...] Useful, but really straining the limits of how much code I want to maintain in a dynamically typed language like Python [...] it was, frankly, really slow
This is great to hear. When I read about your build system in Crafting "Crafting Interpreters" <https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2020/04/05/crafting-craft...>, I had hopes that your next bugbite would be fleshing out half of a quasi-literate programming tool. For a compiler writer, who also happens to be writing a book, the circumstances and fit seem just too natural to avoid it.
I'm looking forward to diving into your Markdown package, too, and expect that it will be easy to port to JS. Nowadays, whenever I need a library for a JS project, my first choice is to check for a clean Dart, Haxe, or Java implementation that does what I want, with the intent of porting it, rather than disadvantaging myself by relying on whatever the NodeJS community has cobbled together and put on NPM. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24495646>
I've been waiting for the print version before diving in, so I'm excited to see it's now available. For what it's worth, I'd be willing to spend more money on an all-format package. I need to hold a book in my hand and not stare at an illuminated screen to absorb the material, but sometimes carry a big book around is not practical so having a Kindle copy is handy. A PDF copy is good for referencing stuff I've already read. Since the book is printed on-demand, such a package might not really be practical, but I thought I'd mention it.
Congrats on getting over the finish line, by the way. It's a huge accomplishment.
Congratulations on completing this long journey. I just bought a copy, mostly to reward your effort, but also to satisfy my curiosity on an aspect of how the PDF sausage was made. I notice that the PDF version of the book doesn't include the semantic tags required for accessibility. Now, please don't take this as a criticism; I know that people (like me) who use a screen reader or other accessibility tool can go with the EPUB or online version. But, I wonder, did you consciously decide to turn off tagged PDF, or were you just going with the default in InDesign? Thanks!
> I just bought a copy, mostly to reward your effort
Thank you!
> did you consciously decide to turn off tagged PDF
I did not. I did export an interactive PDF from InDesign and took care to make sure that the table of contents and internal links work, but I have zero experience in PDF accessibility. I'll take a look into it and see what I can figure out.
You and 99% of people who have ever produced a PDF file, I would guess. Which is why I wish InDesign would do the right thing by default. No big deal for this book since it's available in other formats, and I don't regret purchasing the PDF, but so many other books and documents are made available only as PDF.
This book has been a life saver during the pandemic, not only the world situation but I personally was a bit disappointed with my career. I was inspired by one of your posts where you mention that you were writing every single day for four years. I decided to use the same approach and I started reading the book and coding a bit every single day. I was able to finish it completely and I wrote two implementations of Lox. I just ordered a paper copy, from the PDF sample it seems it looks gorgeous!
Thank you very much for such a great contribution to the world!
Congrats, Bob, and thanks for all of your time and effort. I enjoyed the illustration videos that you included in the earlier blog post [1] (under "Illustrating by Hand"). That post landed at a time when many of us were badly stressed, and I remember it being very soothing.
Agreed. Maybe it was just the April-2020 of it all, but "Writing is Suffering" really hit me in the feels. It's inspiring to see all your hard work reach this milestone, and I can't wait to hold it in my hands.
Thank you so much for all your work on this! I ran through the first part (interpreter in Java, which I ended up doing in Scala for fun) a few years ago, and so much about this sort of thing was demystified for me. I used to think building parsers, tokenizers, AST builders, and interpreters was some sort of unapproachable black magic, but now I realize it's not actually that difficult.
I started working on the second part (decided I'd do this one in Rust instead of C), but got distracted by other things and never got around to picking it up again. I look forward to getting back to it!
Thanks again, and congratulations on getting to this publishing stage!
Thank you so much for everything you have put out. The execution is always beautiful, the content is solid, licensing/pricing model is great, and the meta info about the layout/setup/journey is equally enjoyable.
As the saying goes, your books spark joy. Thank you.
OT: Do I need to purchase the pdf separately if I purchase the print book?
I don't have any automated way of bundling stuff. But if you email me with some proof of purchase (I don't know, a picture of you holding the book, or an order screenshot or something), I'm happy to email you the PDF.
As others have said, congratulations. I've been following your progress for a good part of this journey, and I'm excited that you're finally able to hold a finished product in your hands! And now I'm stuck with a dilemma. I don't _need_ a physical copy, but I really do _want_ one.
Just a friendly nudge toward the physical copy. Just imagine that fresh book smell! Full disclosure--I bought the physical copy. I am excited for these illustrations and the layout looks fantastic.
Oh, I’m absolutely buying it. Even more so after seeing Bob say that he’d be willing to send a digital copy with a physical purchase. I’ll just have to keep the physical copy at my office so that my partner doesn’t have to suffer more clutter in our small living space.
Congrats! Been following you for a while and just finished the blog post...what a huge effort and meticulous attention to detail. I can't wait to buy the book so I can continue to procrastinate reading the full thing in print instead of on my computer monitor
Personally, I find that I procrastinate so much more effectively in print than on a screen. Being able to hold the material in my hands... and yet still failing to actually do so, really makes a difference.
There's nothing like walking around and seeing the constant, physical, and, in the case of this book, beautiful reminder that you're not doing what you want to do.
It would be cool to see the Dart script that you wrote to build the book’s website. I know it’s not intended for anything else, but maybe there are some good ideas in there for other websites?
Congrats! Ordered. Been waiting for a physical copy, being able to scribble notes in the margins and bookmark and flip back and forth by hand just works so much better for me.
I really loved Game Programming Patterns and I'll definitely need to check this out too.
The way you made your book(s), from making them available online for free to the excellent layout of the printed version, was a huge inspiration for me to write my own book. Thank you.
Thanks for writing about your process! I enjoyed it almost as much as Crafting Interpreters, which is to say, quite a lot.
And you absolutely should be proud of your PDF->PNG->Highlight diffs script. As someone who has kept excel files and PDFs in version control I knew exactly the feeling you were talking about. I got to that part and exclaimed out loud, "Damn cool!"
> As someone who has kept excel files and PDFs in version control
Hot tip for handling office file formats or anything that uses a ZIP container: just unzip them and commit that to the repo. It won't fix the issue mentioned of the authoring tool making seemingly arbitrary and unnecessary changes, nor will it give you nifty visual diffs, but it's better than shuffling binary blobs through your version control tools.
AFAIK that won't save space in git, in fact it will probably use more due to the lack of compression and the fact that git commits aren't diffs, they're just commonly displayed as if they are.
Actually, it should (precisely _because_ of Git's approach to storing blobs) but that's besides the point. Saving space had nothing to do with the motivation for the earlier comment.
Woohoo, congrats Bob! I’ll be picking up a copy (is there a difference in your cut for Amazon vs Barnes & Noble?) and am excited to work through it. I’ve been referencing the web version here and there but waited on working through it entirely til I had a physical copy :D
Congratulations, this is such a tremendous achievement. Well done. And thank you for everything that you've done to make language hacking accessible (and Wren is superb, by the way).
Same here to some degree, but my thought in years past was that I could read a purchased [print] book years later, and still express my appreciation (and compensate the author) with a purchase immediately.
Incredible piece of work, and an inspirational process. Your book helped me write my own language compiler. I love the way you explain the pratt parsing technique and also the way the lexer and parser work together so you don't have to read the whole file at once, and how advance(), consume() and expect() functions work. It all just works together beautifully
Just a note to say that your writing is excellent!
After seeing this HN post yesterday, I bought your /Crafting Interpreters/ book to see if it could help me evolve my AST-walker into a threaded-interpreter (using GNU's computed goto-label extension.) I find your writing style to be just the right mix of humor and content to keep me engaged.
Congratulations on releasing the book! Grateful for your work both as a student of computer science and as a Flutter/Dart developer. I’m planning on buying a copy after work. Are there any resources you recommend as a follow up to this book, and do you have any new content planned?
Have you ever tried engineering paper? :) Might save you the step of taping grid paper! The grid only exists on one side, but essentially disappears when scanned.
Not the author, but working through it and having read compiler books in the past... I is very practical vs theoretical, very hands on, and willing to engage with sticky problems rather than glossing over them. The language it implements feels modern (vs the Pascal you do in Let's Write a Compiler.) The writing is fun but not over the top. You hand write the parser instead of using a parser generator.
Bob Nystrom's writing is easily the most enjoyable technical writing I've come across. He has the same precision and humour that Scott Meyers brings to C++, but then with even more humor and far more interesting subject matter. I found his blog on my phone in the middle of the night one night, and enjoyably read hours of it instead of sleeping.
This book was in development while I was working on the core interpreter for the Facebook Horizon visual scripting language. While many things in it are not directly applicable to a VPL, it helped with more robust implementation in at least one area (branching) and overall was a joy to read. I prefer to read print so I'll pick this up
Bought the PDF after reading the free web version, the work definitely has a lot of love put into it and this has to be rewarded.
I've skimmed the web version till the end, but thoroughly read half of it, still learned a lot. Especially the pragmatic approach to code generation via string concatenation. I went a bit further with a small dsl that also does string concatenation.
My C# and Rust implementations are half baked, but still I had a lot of fun doing them, and that's all that counts.
Sometimes I with that intro to compilers books placed a bigger emphasis on recursive descent. Recursive descent works anywhere, without dependencies to external tools such as Bison or ANTLR. I hope that this book marks the start of a trend.
Sure, everyone should learn about LR parsers at some point. But I'd argue that outside a compiler class, knowing recursive descent is likely to be useful more often than knowing LR parsing.
Why Bob why! I kid you not, just 2 days ago I typed your name in the Amazon search box to see if this book would show up even if for pre-orders, but it didn't show. I had some $work money to spend on educational resources and I wanted to buy this book! I ended up buying other books.
But seriously congratulations! I'll happily spend my own money to support all the effort you put into this!
I love Crafting Interpreters, excited to see it in print! I might just buy a copy to support the author, the illustrations do make it coffee table-worthy.
I'm not normally a book person when it comes to learning things, but Crafting Interpreters was fun and easy to follow along with (getting to code something as I went really helped hold my attention)
I went through Part 1 towards the beginning of quarantine, and it spawned several really fun projects and I now feel like I have a basic level of skill writing parsers, which I've actually gotten to use a couple times at my day job.
I will say, I feel like it would be a lot harder to follow along with a physical print vs another window on my computer screen. But I may buy one anyway just to support the author.
As soon as I got the release email I came here to check if this had been posted to HN; it’s an incredible piece of work, and I highly recommend it. It sweeps away much of the mystery behind programming language internals in a clear, easy-to-follow, humorous way.
I worked through the first half of the online book recently, and am excited to buy the print version and work through the rest of it. I can’t get over dead trees, and as fun as it was using the free online version (thanks munificent!), the paperback version will be even better.
Word of warning: The Scanner class does not adhere to the maximal munch rule, so you shouldn't use it to match keywords the way that it's done in the code in the linked reddit thread. If you replace the word "foobar" in the input with "truebar", it will then be tokenized as the keyword true followed by the identifier "bar", which is obviously not what you want.
I read the free web version of this; it's probably my favorite tech book ever. If you want to learn the basics of implementing a programming language, I can't recommend this enough.
I got excited when I saw the email, and I'm glad this is at the top of HN now. Fantastic modern book on language development that I'd recommend to anyone interested in the subject.
Congratulations, this looks amazing! I enjoyed reading the web version over the last few years and learned a lot from it. Now I'm looking forward to owning the hard copy as well :)
I was just wondering when I'll get to have a physical copy while I was working through chapter 8 in Crafting Interpreters. Thank you so much for your contribution.
No, there is no DRM on any of the electronic formats—Kindle, EPUB, or PDF. If you buy it, it's yours. (But please don't upload it to any ebook-sharing sites.)
The book walks through two interpreter implementations. The first is in Java, and the second in C. The code has also been ported to many other languages:
What’s wrong with Java for a compiler implementation language? One of the most powerful dynamic compilers in the world is in Java. And its object orientated design works well for compilers.
http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2021/07/29/640-pages-in-15...