Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation

"Engineering a Compiler" by Cooper and Torczon The Dragon Book is not the best book these days, it focuses too much on stuff you won't care about and not enough on the stuff you do care about. (e.g. it focuses a lot on parser generators and says almost nothing about analysis and optimization) EDIT: A good followup text is "Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation" by Muchnick

10 years ago, I loved Hanson and Fraser: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805316701 This is a good tour of front-end and back-end stuff, a decent intro to code gen, and is built on a hand-written recursive-descent C parser. That it's specific to one C compiler made it better to read straight through, but I rarely refer back to it. So far this year, I've been liking Muchnick: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558603204 This is pretty heavy on the backend and codegen, which is where my head is at these days. Compilers is a big topic. What part interests you most? Parsing? Optimization? Semantics and error detection? Code generation?