Language Implementation Patterns: Create Your Own Domain-Specific and General Programming Languages Book

I have not read the last half of 12th chapter and the 13th chapter. So take my review with a grain of salt. Also, I'm not that good at reading technical books too, so also take that into account.

TL;DR: You want to learn about the science behind compilers, probably not the best. If you want to straight away implement the compiler, probably the best.

With that out of the way, let's focus on the book. The one major downside I found in the book is that it is written for the older version of ANTLR. So you can't just start copy pasting code and start tinkering with grammars right away. You gotta combine it with the ANTLR v4 reference. The algorithms presented in the book are pretty easily adaptable to the v4 of ANTLR. As any of you reading the book should know, this is not a theoretical or conceptual book. This is down right implementation focused. It could be considered its strength and also somewhat of a weakness. The book is simple, I'd definitely give it that. Terence has done a great job boiling it down to just the essentials, so almost anyone can follow it. Even a person who has never done anything with compilers and just knows Java will do fine, except for some bits where help might be needed. Sometimes I think that the author has taken one too many examples and so the book feels slow. All in all, great book.