(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:30 am)
Back in my high school days, I found that I liked knowing the hoary details of low level computer operations: assembly language, instruction decoding, firmware and register manipulation.
One regret I’ve had, though, is not ever taking a Compilers course. That is, how to write a compiler for a language like C or C++. Unlike some of the fruitier “Learn to code in Pascal, LANGUAGE OF THE FUTURE” courses, writing a compiler is a marriage between expression of code in a high level language and implementation in nice spurts of machine code. While I have no great desire to write compilers for a living, I do wish I knew more about how they work. So I was bopping around the web today and came across Inger, an open-source compiler with an e-book. Cool. And also Open C++, an open-source C++ compiler project. The Internet rocks.
2 Comments
Same thing for me… I recently wished I knew more about how they work, and I came across the dragon book. Apparently this is one of the better-known books on the subject, and isn’t cheap, but from the tiny bit I’ve seen it is definitely worth a few cups of coffee and a few hours at your local strip-mall bookseller.
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Cool…thanks for the link! I’ll have to see if I can find it used.