Crafting Interpreters: A Review

Over the past few months, reading Bob Nystrom's book Crafting Interpreters helped me learn about some of the inner workings of interpreters and compilers. Crafting Interpreters discusses how to implement an interpreter for a programming language, Lox. While implementing the tree-walk interpreter, the book introduces different concepts behind programming languages and interpreters. At the end of the tree-walk interpreter section, there's a complete, working Lox interpreter that can read and interpret Lox programs. At over 600 pages long, Crafting Interpreters isn't a quick Sunday afternoon read. It took me almost six months-an hour or so a day for a few days a week-to complete the book and implement both interpreters. Many programming books tend to be tedious and challenging to read, but I found the writing in Crafting Interpreters simple, engaging, and even sometimes amusing. I thought Crafting Interpreters was brilliant and one of the best technical books I've ever read. Without hesitation, I'd recommend it to anyone interested in learning about languages and interpreters.