lex & yacc, 2nd Edition

Rating:
Summary: Probably the most useful book I've bought in years
Review: I needed to build a rather complex scanner for an HTML code-generator and (on a separate project) a mib parsing tool. This book got me up and running within a week or so. The examples are useful and the authors cover many of the different "flavors" of these tools (i.e. flex, bison, etc.) I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Very helpful to get you started
Review: I've used this book a lot to help me get started using Flex and Bison, and I still often refer to it. The official Flex and Bison manuals help to fill in any gaps and flesh out details. An update would be nice that included information available on the Web. The included examples were okay, but a simple procedural language example would be very useful.

Rating:
Summary: Very good, badly needed, but incomplete and frustrating
Review: In general this book is very good, and I would highly recommended it for anybody using tools like lex and yacc. It covers all the areas (both good and bad) of these tools. However, I find that the book is frustrating and incomplete in two ways :- (1) when it comes to solving some of the problems reported by such tools as lex and yacc, there is not enough of examples, especially less-trivial examples, and some of the more potentially obscure problems that can occur. (2) it is very frustrating that the page numbers listed in the index are out by 1 or 2 pages. In this era of technology this should not happen.

Rating:
Summary: a very helpful book
Review: It is a very well organized book. It is a must read for lex and yacc users. Yet it lacks some detailed infomation about debugging .

Rating:
Summary: Best book currently available on the subject
Review: Lex & Yacc are extremely powerful programming tools. They are also difficult to master. This book provides a good start. You may need to read it several times and work through the examples before things begin making sense. I also recommend the FSF's book "The Bison Manual" for indepth info on the most common Yacc-compatible parse generator.

Rating:
Summary: Incomplete
Review: Lex & Yacc are fairly complex topics and any assitance is greatly appreciated. And this book is a good introduction to these tools. However, many details are only mentioned in passing and others completely ignored. A 2nd edition, with a more extensive list of the Yacc options and information on bison would earn a well respected spot on my bookshelf.

Rating:
Summary: 5 stars for being in print, 3 for staying the same
Review: lex & yacc used to feed a starving market; people who really needed to know how to write a parser generator and possibly wanted a more general and automatable way to write a lexical analyzer. As one reviewer already noted, those readers were able to work through two or three times and let the information sink in.
The book's been very, very successful. It also hasn't sought to repay the market by refining itself and becoming more accessible to readers. Forget that the principles behind these tools haven't changed; there are or could be fresh examples -- who needs help writing a curses-based, menu-driven interface anymore? The SQL parser example is a loooong source dump; a shorter example would help to focus on principles, and allow room for more liberal commenting.
I far prefer this book over man pages, but the title could stand a refresh.

Rating:
Summary: Still the best lex/yacc intorduction out there!
Review: Like many O'Reilly books, this is really just an introduction to
something that is hard to get intorduced to. The book is not a
definitive guide, but a definitive guide has no starting point.
After reading this book, you should be able to construct some
simple scanners with lex/flex and parsers with yacc/bison, but
more importantly, you should be able to read more definitive
documentation.

Rating:
Summary: Still the best lex/yacc intorduction out there!
Review: Like many O'Reilly books, this is really just an introduction to
something that is hard to get intorduced to. The book is not a
definitive guide, but a definitive guide has no starting point.
After reading this book, you should be able to construct some
simple scanners with lex/flex and parsers with yacc/bison, but
more importantly, you should be able to read more definitive
documentation.

Rating:
Summary: The most complete reference I could write.
Review: My goal in this revision was to provide as complete a guide to the popular versions of lex and yacc as I could.  Even though these tools are now over 20 years old, they remain the basic ones that everyone starts with when they need to process any sort of language, so I wanted to document them once and for all.
I also run the comp.compilers usenet newsgroup, which often has discussions of parsing topics beyond those in this book. If you like the book (or if you don't), drop by with any unanswered questions.