I had this book at University. It made a good companion text to our main textbook, the dragon book. The dragon book covers a lot of ground, and is very interesting, but Holub's book is much more practical, with everything illustrated with real code examples (if my memory is correct). This was a big help when learning and made compilers a lot more fun. It's well worth reading.
It's interesting that most of the content is still just as relevant today. Coding styles change over time, and definitely the popularity of languages has changed, but the theory is still just as useful.
Off topic, but we had the 'International' edition of this book. Many publishers at the time did this, I'm not sure why. The explanation was that it was to make it more affordable for us, although the prices were still high. They were soft cover editions with plain covers (this book had a red cover with only the title and author, in white). The linked page is the first time I've seen the real cover. This is probably an early example of regional pricing, much like DVD region codes. They could charge more in USA and less in other territories I guess.
Mine was also the international edition, with dark blue cover. Not having been a CS major I bought a copy out of curiosity on how a compiler is made, since it seemed a lot more approachable than the famous dragon book. I admit I was a bit overwhelmed at the amount of code it took to build a compiler. Glad to see the book again in its entirety.
It's interesting that most of the content is still just as relevant today. Coding styles change over time, and definitely the popularity of languages has changed, but the theory is still just as useful.
Off topic, but we had the 'International' edition of this book. Many publishers at the time did this, I'm not sure why. The explanation was that it was to make it more affordable for us, although the prices were still high. They were soft cover editions with plain covers (this book had a red cover with only the title and author, in white). The linked page is the first time I've seen the real cover. This is probably an early example of regional pricing, much like DVD region codes. They could charge more in USA and less in other territories I guess.