What can you do to get yourself up to speed? That's a good question. Here are some suggestions.
- Read the Apocalypses and Exegesises.
- Learn how to write and understand a grammar (in the computer sense--something you'd feed to lex and yacc). Grammars make writing compilers a lot easier.
- General background reading on parsing is good
- Intro CS texts on compiler generation are useful. (Though skip the Dragon book, it's not that good)
- Practice! Write parsers for simple stuff, play with Parse::RecDescent, Parse::YAPP, and Parse::Nibbler, twiddle around.
- Look at the grammars for other languages. Perl and Ruby both have grammars that ship with them. (Though I'm not sure that'll help or hurt...)
- Size up your skills and decide what you realistically are up to. We need folks that can do all sorts of things, not just write compilers, so any and all help's useful.
