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> The Coursera Automata course is awesome.

Oh yes. I have a haphazard knowledge of Chomsky hierarchy, and this course is structuring it beautifully. It also fills a number of holes.

Today's latest success: I finally "get" what an LL(1) grammar is! And why so many programming languages have regular tokens and LL(1) grammars.

I bet I'll understand the fundamentals of Yacc before the course is over.



If you are interested in going deeper, may I recommend "Parsing Techniques" by Dick Grune et al [1]. I have read this book over five times and still find gems hidden that I must have failed to grasp in a prior reading.

The author provides the PDF of the first edition on his website [2]. Read the last paragraph of page 60 of the book (page 50 of the PDF). I read this again whenever coming in doubt.

A great thing about the book is also its annotated bibliography. The author cites hundreds of papers for extended reading, but has also written a paragraph on each cited paper explaining the context around it, how it fits with the rest of the subject, and a quick summary of what were the key contributions and findings.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Parsing-Techniques-Practical-Monograph...

[2] http://dickgrune.com/Books/PTAPG_1st_Edition/




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