Crafting Interpreters is available in print | Hacker News Reader

Crafting Interpreters is available in print

craftinginterpreters.com

623 pointsazhenley118 comments

Author here! It feels amazing to have this done and live. I'm happy to talk about whatever you might want to know about it. If you're curious how the sausage was made, I wrote a blog post about taking the web book and bringing it to print and ebook here:

http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2021/07/29/640-pages-in-15...

Congrats man, I love the book and the final physical/PDF book layout/design is amazing!

Thank you! It looks really nice in person, if I do say so myself. It's so cool to see the illustrations in full crisp 600 DPI.

Congrats! Been following you for a while and just finished the blog post...what a huge effort and meticulous attention to detail. I can't wait to buy the book so I can continue to procrastinate reading the full thing in print instead of on my computer monitor

Personally, I find that I procrastinate so much more effectively in print than on a screen. Being able to hold the material in my hands... and yet still failing to actually do so, really makes a difference.

There's nothing like walking around and seeing the constant, physical, and, in the case of this book, beautiful reminder that you're not doing what you want to do.

Congratulations on completing this long journey. I just bought a copy, mostly to reward your effort, but also to satisfy my curiosity on an aspect of how the PDF sausage was made. I notice that the PDF version of the book doesn't include the semantic tags required for accessibility. Now, please don't take this as a criticism; I know that people (like me) who use a screen reader or other accessibility tool can go with the EPUB or online version. But, I wonder, did you consciously decide to turn off tagged PDF, or were you just going with the default in InDesign? Thanks!

> I just bought a copy, mostly to reward your effort

Thank you!

> did you consciously decide to turn off tagged PDF

I did not. I did export an interactive PDF from InDesign and took care to make sure that the table of contents and internal links work, but I have zero experience in PDF accessibility. I'll take a look into it and see what I can figure out.

> I have zero experience in PDF accessibility.

You and 99% of people who have ever produced a PDF file, I would guess. Which is why I wish InDesign would do the right thing by default. No big deal for this book since it's available in other formats, and I don't regret purchasing the PDF, but so many other books and documents are made available only as PDF.

Thank you for buying a copy. If you prefer to try out the EPUB file to see if that's better, email me and I can hook you up.

Congrats! Can't wait to get my hands on a copy.

I mention you on page 566. :)

Well if I wasn't sold before... ha! <3

Congrats, Bob, and thanks for all of your time and effort. I enjoyed the illustration videos that you included in the earlier blog post [1] (under "Illustrating by Hand"). That post landed at a time when many of us were badly stressed, and I remember it being very soothing.

[1] https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2020/04/05/crafting-craft...

Agreed. Maybe it was just the April-2020 of it all, but "Writing is Suffering" really hit me in the feels. It's inspiring to see all your hard work reach this milestone, and I can't wait to hold it in my hands.

Congrats on the print version, Bob! I appreciate you taking the time to share everything you've learned about the writing and publishing process.

I look forward to reading this!

That's going to look awesome next to my copy of Game Programming Patterns! ... What do you mean "Temporarily Out Of Stock", amazon.co.uk!?

It should sort itself out soon, I hope.

I'm rather hoping you will sell out your print run, actually. :)

But to pile in with everybody else, congratulations!

It's print-on-demand so selling out should be hard, but I welcome any attempts to overwhelm the system. :)

So that was step 3 all along! Invite DDOS.

Step 4: ...

Woohoo, congrats Bob! I’ll be picking up a copy (is there a difference in your cut for Amazon vs Barnes & Noble?) and am excited to work through it. I’ve been referencing the web version here and there but waited on working through it entirely til I had a physical copy :D

I'll get a bigger cut from Amazon, but order from wherever you prefer.

Ordered, thanks. Regrettably I have read fewer than 1% of the books I’ve ever bought, but this one has a much better chance than most.

Congratulations on finally putting this project to rest.

Same here to some degree, but my thought in years past was that I could read a purchased [print] book years later, and still express my appreciation (and compensate the author) with a purchase immediately.

I am in absolute awe at the PDF diff tool. Wonderful, wonderful stuff.

It's literally the best idea I've had since I proposed to my wife.

Congrats! Will be getting a copy just because I enjoyed reading the online version. I love your writing style!

Hi Bob! Congratulations on shipping the book!

This book has been a life saver during the pandemic, not only the world situation but I personally was a bit disappointed with my career. I was inspired by one of your posts where you mention that you were writing every single day for four years. I decided to use the same approach and I started reading the book and coding a bit every single day. I was able to finish it completely and I wrote two implementations of Lox. I just ordered a paper copy, from the PDF sample it seems it looks gorgeous!

Thank you very much for such a great contribution to the world!

> I was inspired by one of your posts where you mention that you were writing every single day for four years.

Yes! It is the dumbest, weirdest life hack, but it seems to work for perfectionists like us.

I wonder if anyone wrote a book about this!

If you're curious there's a subreddit for a technique like this for building/breaking habits https://www.reddit.com/r/thexeffect

Also https://www.reddit.com/r/NonZeroDay/

As others have said, congratulations. I've been following your progress for a good part of this journey, and I'm excited that you're finally able to hold a finished product in your hands! And now I'm stuck with a dilemma. I don't _need_ a physical copy, but I really do _want_ one.

Just a friendly nudge toward the physical copy. Just imagine that fresh book smell! Full disclosure--I bought the physical copy. I am excited for these illustrations and the layout looks fantastic.

Oh, I’m absolutely buying it. Even more so after seeing Bob say that he’d be willing to send a digital copy with a physical purchase. I’ll just have to keep the physical copy at my office so that my partner doesn’t have to suffer more clutter in our small living space.

It’s good work, congratulations.

Congratulations. Really enjoy your blog as well, I think I've read every post about programming languages. I've cited them a lot too.

I really like the hand-drawn diagrams in the sample PDF! Are the actually hand-drawn or stylized SVG?

Literally hand drawn with my hands. Here's a video of me making one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN1MsCXkPSA

It's, like, comically time consuming. But also pretty satisfying.

Wow, that is indeed some serious dedication. You even fixed the kerning of the labels. The result looks great. Nice job!

Have you ever tried engineering paper? :) Might save you the step of taping grid paper! The grid only exists on one side, but essentially disappears when scanned.

https://www.staples.com/TOPS-Engineering-Computation-Pad-Gum...

Ah, that's a good idea! I haven't seen that stuff in ages.

It tends to be hard to find outside of college towns....

Your book was great; I learned a ton going through it. Congratulations on getting it to print!

Thank you so much for everything you have put out. The execution is always beautiful, the content is solid, licensing/pricing model is great, and the meta info about the layout/setup/journey is equally enjoyable.

As the saying goes, your books spark joy. Thank you.

OT: Do I need to purchase the pdf separately if I purchase the print book?

I try, thank you!

I snuck in the OT question in there as an edit, but curious, is there an option to buy pdf + print or do those need to go separately?

Also interested in this. I prefer a first pass with a physical copy and having a pdf to use as a reference/search

I don't have any automated way of bundling stuff. But if you email me with some proof of purchase (I don't know, a picture of you holding the book, or an order screenshot or something), I'm happy to email you the PDF.

Nice! I can do that. Once again, thank you so much.

Can't wait to hear what you announce next.

It would be cool to see the Dart script that you wrote to build the book’s website. I know it’s not intended for anything else, but maybe there are some good ideas in there for other websites?

Edit: I guess that’s here: https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters/blob/mast...

That's correct. The entire build system is:

https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters/tree/mast...

Thanks for writing about your process! I enjoyed it almost as much as Crafting Interpreters, which is to say, quite a lot.

And you absolutely should be proud of your PDF->PNG->Highlight diffs script. As someone who has kept excel files and PDFs in version control I knew exactly the feeling you were talking about. I got to that part and exclaimed out loud, "Damn cool!"

> As someone who has kept excel files and PDFs in version control

Hot tip for handling office file formats or anything that uses a ZIP container: just unzip them and commit that to the repo. It won't fix the issue mentioned of the authoring tool making seemingly arbitrary and unnecessary changes, nor will it give you nifty visual diffs, but it's better than shuffling binary blobs through your version control tools.

AFAIK that won't save space in git, in fact it will probably use more due to the lack of compression and the fact that git commits aren't diffs, they're just commonly displayed as if they are.

> AFAIK that won't save space in git

Actually, it should (precisely _because_ of Git's approach to storing blobs) but that's besides the point. Saving space had nothing to do with the motivation for the earlier comment.

> in fact it will probably use more

No.

> I decided to rewrite the whole build system for the book in Dart. The build script I wrote for my first book was dead simple. Literally a single Python script that took a Markdown file for each book chapter and rendered it to HTML while weaving in the code snippets. The world’s dumbest static site generator. [...] Useful, but really straining the limits of how much code I want to maintain in a dynamically typed language like Python [...] it was, frankly, really slow

This is great to hear. When I read about your build system in Crafting "Crafting Interpreters" <https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2020/04/05/crafting-craft...>, I had hopes that your next bugbite would be fleshing out half of a quasi-literate programming tool. For a compiler writer, who also happens to be writing a book, the circumstances and fit seem just too natural to avoid it.

I'm looking forward to diving into your Markdown package, too, and expect that it will be easy to port to JS. Nowadays, whenever I need a library for a JS project, my first choice is to check for a clean Dart, Haxe, or Java implementation that does what I want, with the intent of porting it, rather than disadvantaging myself by relying on whatever the NodeJS community has cobbled together and put on NPM. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24495646>

EDIT: There is a typo "CCS" in the blog post. Highlighted: <https://hyp.is/d2cCEPCLEeu7jSft-ex2Ug/journal.stuffwithstuff...>

I've been waiting for the print version before diving in, so I'm excited to see it's now available. For what it's worth, I'd be willing to spend more money on an all-format package. I need to hold a book in my hand and not stare at an illuminated screen to absorb the material, but sometimes carry a big book around is not practical so having a Kindle copy is handy. A PDF copy is good for referencing stuff I've already read. Since the book is printed on-demand, such a package might not really be practical, but I thought I'd mention it.

Congrats on getting over the finish line, by the way. It's a huge accomplishment.

There used to be a thing where Amazon would let you bundle the print and Kindle versions, but I think they stopped doing that.

If you buy a print copy and email me some kind of confirmation, I'd be happy to send you the PDF or EPUB file.

Thank you so much for all the work you put into this!

Just another congrats! I have been waiting for this day. Thanks for all your work!

Incredible piece of work, and an inspirational process. Your book helped me write my own language compiler. I love the way you explain the pratt parsing technique and also the way the lexer and parser work together so you don't have to read the whole file at once, and how advance(), consume() and expect() functions work. It all just works together beautifully

I really loved Game Programming Patterns and I'll definitely need to check this out too.

The way you made your book(s), from making them available online for free to the excellent layout of the printed version, was a huge inspiration for me to write my own book. Thank you.

Great job, man. I've consulted the online version a number of times over the years. Will be purchasing this in dead tree form :D.

> Will be purchasing this in dead tree form :D.

I like to think of it as "carbon capture representation" these days.

Congratulations on releasing the book! Grateful for your work both as a student of computer science and as a Flutter/Dart developer. I’m planning on buying a copy after work. Are there any resources you recommend as a follow up to this book, and do you have any new content planned?

The last chapter suggests a few places to go next after reading the book:

http://craftinginterpreters.com/optimization.html#where-to-n...

I have absolutely nothing planned after this. I plan to not have any plans for a while. :)

Can you please point out the differences compared to other books for the same topic? Thanks!

Not the author, but working through it and having read compiler books in the past... I is very practical vs theoretical, very hands on, and willing to engage with sticky problems rather than glossing over them. The language it implements feels modern (vs the Pascal you do in Let's Write a Compiler.) The writing is fun but not over the top. You hand write the parser instead of using a parser generator.

It’s written by Bob and the others aren’t. That’s a good enough reason for me.

Congratulations, this is such a tremendous achievement. Well done. And thank you for everything that you've done to make language hacking accessible (and Wren is superb, by the way).

This was such an amazing read. Getting nervous about not being able to diff things is so relatable!

Congrats! Ordered. Been waiting for a physical copy, being able to scribble notes in the margins and bookmark and flip back and forth by hand just works so much better for me.

Thank you so much for all your work on this! I ran through the first part (interpreter in Java, which I ended up doing in Scala for fun) a few years ago, and so much about this sort of thing was demystified for me. I used to think building parsers, tokenizers, AST builders, and interpreters was some sort of unapproachable black magic, but now I realize it's not actually that difficult.

I started working on the second part (decided I'd do this one in Rust instead of C), but got distracted by other things and never got around to picking it up again. I look forward to getting back to it!

Thanks again, and congratulations on getting to this publishing stage!

You might find this blog post interesting:

https://ceronman.com/2021/07/22/my-experience-crafting-an-in...

Oh, excellent, thanks for the link! I still want to do this myself, but am now pretty wary of building a GC in Rust...

hey! I’d been thinking about this just a few days ago! It’s great that the print version is finally out. Congratulations on publishing your book!

Just a note to say that your writing is excellent!

After seeing this HN post yesterday, I bought your /Crafting Interpreters/ book to see if it could help me evolve my AST-walker into a threaded-interpreter (using GNU's computed goto-label extension.) I find your writing style to be just the right mix of humor and content to keep me engaged.

#1 Bestseller! -> https://imgur.com/3GJkMvd

Bob Nystrom's writing is easily the most enjoyable technical writing I've come across. He has the same precision and humour that Scott Meyers brings to C++, but then with even more humor and far more interesting subject matter. I found his blog on my phone in the middle of the night one night, and enjoyably read hours of it instead of sleeping.

Keep writing, Bob!

This book was in development while I was working on the core interpreter for the Facebook Horizon visual scripting language. While many things in it are not directly applicable to a VPL, it helped with more robust implementation in at least one area (branching) and overall was a joy to read. I prefer to read print so I'll pick this up

Bought the PDF after reading the free web version, the work definitely has a lot of love put into it and this has to be rewarded.

I've skimmed the web version till the end, but thoroughly read half of it, still learned a lot. Especially the pragmatic approach to code generation via string concatenation. I went a bit further with a small dsl that also does string concatenation.

My C# and Rust implementations are half baked, but still I had a lot of fun doing them, and that's all that counts.

Can't wait to see Bob's next endeavor.

I used the website for my compilers class this last semester and it was great.

Recursive descent parsing and a hand-rolled lexer teaches grammars and general language design way better than other alternatives.

Sometimes I with that intro to compilers books placed a bigger emphasis on recursive descent. Recursive descent works anywhere, without dependencies to external tools such as Bison or ANTLR. I hope that this book marks the start of a trend.

Sure, everyone should learn about LR parsers at some point. But I'd argue that outside a compiler class, knowing recursive descent is likely to be useful more often than knowing LR parsing.

Why Bob why! I kid you not, just 2 days ago I typed your name in the Amazon search box to see if this book would show up even if for pre-orders, but it didn't show. I had some $work money to spend on educational resources and I wanted to buy this book! I ended up buying other books.

But seriously congratulations! I'll happily spend my own money to support all the effort you put into this!

I mostly read PDFs on an iPad. The only books I bought as paperbacks are the ones I will reread over and over out of joy:

Knuth: The Art of Computer Programming

CLRS: Introduction to Algorithms

Strang: Introduction to Linear Algebra

H&P: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach

and now I ordered yours, Bob! Just wanted to show my respect. When my crunch time is over at work I will answer the issue I opened on GitHub ;-)

I love Crafting Interpreters, excited to see it in print! I might just buy a copy to support the author, the illustrations do make it coffee table-worthy.

I'm putting it on my Christmas list as I'm broke right now, definitely a great display book!

I'm not normally a book person when it comes to learning things, but Crafting Interpreters was fun and easy to follow along with (getting to code something as I went really helped hold my attention)

I went through Part 1 towards the beginning of quarantine, and it spawned several really fun projects and I now feel like I have a basic level of skill writing parsers, which I've actually gotten to use a couple times at my day job.

I will say, I feel like it would be a lot harder to follow along with a physical print vs another window on my computer screen. But I may buy one anyway just to support the author.

Highly recommend!

As soon as I got the release email I came here to check if this had been posted to HN; it’s an incredible piece of work, and I highly recommend it. It sweeps away much of the mystery behind programming language internals in a clear, easy-to-follow, humorous way.

I worked through the first half of the online book recently, and am excited to buy the print version and work through the rest of it. I can’t get over dead trees, and as fun as it was using the free online version (thanks munificent!), the paperback version will be even better.

Somewhat related, I recently read about the undocumented tokenizer that comes with the python re module. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerTIL/comments/4tpt03/pytho...

Word of warning: The Scanner class does not adhere to the maximal munch rule, so you shouldn't use it to match keywords the way that it's done in the code in the linked reddit thread. If you replace the word "foobar" in the input with "truebar", it will then be tokenized as the keyword true followed by the identifier "bar", which is obviously not what you want.

I just finished the first part of the book (building the intepreter, but I did it in typed Python).

The book sent me back to the college days where I remember doing similar things.

Can't wait to start working on the bytecode virtual machine.

It's really an excellent book.

How difficult was it to make this in a different language than the one used on the book?

Readers have ported the code in the book to many languages already:

https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters/wiki/Lox-...

That means it's either not too hard to do yourself, or at the very least you can use their ports as a reference as you work through the book.

Of course Rust has the longest list in something like this.

Thanks for the book by the way, I'm picking it up for the first time now

Pretty easy, it uses Java and C and didn't use any "exclusive features" of them

How about external libs?

The code in the book deliberately uses no external dependencies. You'll be fine. :)

I've been using C++20 and I haven't run into any Java I couldn't translate yet.

I read the free web version of this; it's probably my favorite tech book ever. If you want to learn the basics of implementing a programming language, I can't recommend this enough.

I got excited when I saw the email, and I'm glad this is at the top of HN now. Fantastic modern book on language development that I'd recommend to anyone interested in the subject.

Congratulations, this looks amazing! I enjoyed reading the web version over the last few years and learned a lot from it. Now I'm looking forward to owning the hard copy as well :)

Congratulations!

I was just wondering when I'll get to have a physical copy while I was working through chapter 8 in Crafting Interpreters. Thank you so much for your contribution.

I am so excited to see this in print! I know that this was a ton of work, and I can't wait to get a paper copy. Nice work, Bob!

I did follow the whole adventure online. I will buy this bokk for sure.

Thanks, Bob. You did a wonderful job.

Congrats on finishing your book. I ordered a print copy!

I received my copy yesterday! Any plans for a hardcover instead of a paperback? Just lies nicer on a table and doesn't wear of as fast.

Is the Kindle version of your book protected with DRM?

No, there is no DRM on any of the electronic formats—Kindle, EPUB, or PDF. If you buy it, it's yours. (But please don't upload it to any ebook-sharing sites.)

Not planning on uploading it, but if some formats had DRM and others did not, I would pick one DRM-free formats.

Also, I read the first few pages on Amazon and I'm sorry about Ginny. She looks like she was a good friend.

She was my #1 buddy.

Awesome! I just started working through this too.

Between

A) Being implemented in Java

and

B) Not having anything satisfying on types

I can't get excited about it. I know it's an uncommon opinion but there's so much missing it can't be a monograph/treatise.

The PDF sample I opened suggests it's implemented in C. The GitHub suggests it uses both C and Java: https://github.com/confucianzuoyuan/craftinginterpreters

The book walks through two interpreter implementations. The first is in Java, and the second in C. The code has also been ported to many other languages:

https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters/wiki/Lox-...

What’s wrong with Java for a compiler implementation language? One of the most powerful dynamic compilers in the world is in Java. And its object orientated design works well for compilers.

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