Most people who criticize the Dragon (Compilers etc... by Aho et al.) book seem to focus on chapters 3 and 4 which are the chapters on lexical analysis and parsing. The book has 12 chapters. Whatever your feelings on the parsing techniques, the book covers WAY more than that. It has a really good introduction to code generation, syntax directed translation, control flow analysis, dataflow analysis, and local, global and whole program optimizations.

As someone who has quite a few books on compilers, program analysis, type theory, etc... I find the Dragon book an irreplaceable reference to this day. It has a breadth of content shared by very few other books. For instance, Muchnick's classic "Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation" is really good for analysis and optimization but neglects all front end topics. The only area where I believe the Dragon book is inadequate in is type theory (I recommend Types and Programming languages [TAPL] by Pierce and Semantics with Application by Nielson for a gentler intro).

As to parsing, its chapter on parsing (4) is not as "hip" has some people want. However, it is solid and will teach you how to do parsing. There are newer and fancier techniques not covered in Chapter 4 but in general most people would benefit just having a solid understanding of recursive descent parsing!

Don't read only the Dragon book if you're interested in compilers (or parsing in general). But it should be read, in addition to whatever else you read on the subject. It's classic for a reason.

Most programmers don't understand parsing worth a crap, imho. Some compiler theory would do most of us some good. I read it because I was doing data stream parsing back in the olden days before XML (which was before JSON), when we had to write our own stream formats. It really changed my whole way of thinking about a fundamental class of programming problems.

Hey, I seconded this, the Dragons Book is not the best textbook or introduction to the topic, there are a lot of better ones. The Dragons Book is more of a classic. If you want to read a good book on compilers construction then you're better off reading "Engineering a Compiler" by K. Cooper and L. Torczon or "Modern Compiler Implementation in ML" by A. Appel.

If you want more resources on Compilers other than books, such as tutorials, guides, talks and papers, then go ahead and check the Awesome Compilers vertical I compiled a while ago: https://github.com/aalhour/awesome-compilers

Cheers!

Writing a parser is broadly applicable to a wide range of problems, not just writing a compiler.

Do note that there are multiple editions of the Dragon book and later editions have a far better codegen section.

One of the more famous compiler writers from that era once told me that the Dragon book's original codegen section wasn't even historically how anyone wrote a compiler and it certainly didn't reflect modern practice even back in the 90s.

However, the update significantly improves it with the addition of Monica Lam's contribution. I don't know if it's state of the art for codegen (probably not), but I'm not sure what book is (Muchnick is great too, but this is also quite old now).

CTMCP is awesome indeed, one of my favourite along with SICP I would say.