There is a perlish connection to at least two of the best books on parsing and language design in general—though it is in-direct. If you remember the origins of Perl as being a combination of Awk, Sed and the kitchen sink, you might also remember that the 'A' in Awk stands for Aho. As in Alfred V. Aho, one of authors of Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, by Alfred V. Aho and Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey D. Ullman. Stanford CA., Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1985. Also The Theory of Parsing Translation and Compiling, by Alfred V. Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman. Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Prentice-Hall, 1973.

The first of course is the 'Dragon' book, already suggested. The second is a two volume treatment that was the best on the subject in the years before the dragon came. Of course on of the problems with being the best is that rank doesn't necessarily mean anything about it being understandable! For that I recommend something a bit more like The Anatomy of a Compiler, by John A. N. Lee. New York, NY. D. Van Nostrand Company, 1974. If you prefer a 'step-by-step' approach with a bit more hands on, then there is A Retargetable C Compiler: Design and Implementation, by Christopher Fraser and David Hanson. Menlo Park, CA., Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995. This last is one of the few published works written as an example of Literate Programming and is worth the look for that alone.

–hsm