Early Programming Books

When I was teaching compiler classes, I liked Richard J. Le Blanc's "Crafting a Compiler." I used Waite and Goos once. It was precise but a bit too terse for the students. The compiler structure I taught was based upon work of Frank de Remer and Tom Pennello, but their book "Compiler Construction by Hand and by Tool" never saw print. Frank de Remer simplified LR with its potentially exponential growth, to SLR and LALR in his MIT Ph.D. thesis. Yacc (written by Robert Corbett, still a denizen of the Fortran committees) is a LALR parser generator. I use the generator written by Al Shannon when he was Charlie Wetherell's student, now updated, which implements David Pager's algorithm that generates a parser that is LR where necessary and LALR or SLR or LR(0) where possible.