Seth D. Bergmann wrote:There are several compiler design textbooks available today, but most have been written for graduate students. Here at Rowan University, our students have had difficulty reading these books. However, I felt it was not the subject matter that was the problem, but the way it was presented. I was sure that if concepts were presented at a slower pace, with sample problems and diagrams to illustrate the concepts, that our students would be able to master the concepts. This is what I have attempted to do in writing this book. 

This book is a revision of earlier editions that were written for Pascal and C++ based curricula. As many computer science departments have moved to Java as the primary language in the undergraduate curriculum, I have produced this edition to accommodate those departments. This book is not intended to be strictly an object- oriented approach to compiler design. Though most Java compilers compile to an intermediate form known as Byte Code, the approach taken here is a more traditional one in which we compile to native code for a particular machine. 

The most essential prerequisites for this book are courses in Java application programming, Data Structures, Assembly Language or Computer Architecture, and possibly Programming Languages. If the student has not studied formal languages and automata, this book includes introductory sections on these the- oretic topics, but in this case it is not likely that all seven chapters will be covered in a one semester course. Students who have studied the theory will be able to skip the preliminary sections (2.0, 3.0, 4.0) without loss of continuity.