The Definitive ANTLR Reference: Building Domain-Specific Languages Book

This USF CS professor has two main inventions to his credit, ANTLR and string template. This book gives Java developers almost everything you might need to learn how to use these two technologies.

ANTLR is ANother Tool for Language Recognition which empowers developers to embed the ability to use domain specific languages into their applications. With ANTLR, you specify a grammar, run a tool to generate the parser and lexer code from the specification, and call that parser and lexer from within your application.

Terrence Parr is the consummate educator and the book's organisation shows it. He starts with a high-level overview into the computer science problem of formal language parsing. Then he follows up with a quick start tutorial on how to get your first ANTLR program written. Now that he has whetted your appetite, you get the complete reference materials on all features of ANTLR. After that comes a deep dive into compiler theory as it relates to ANTLR.

The guide is definitive but let's not over promise on what any single book can do. If you have never taken any college level courses on Chomsky's Theory of Formal Languages or compiler theory, then you may not come to completely understand and appreciate every nuance of ANTLR. Even so, if any book can get you up and running with ANTLR, then it will be this book. It was this resource that permitted me to host ANTLR in a Java servlet as a weekend project.