Memory gets triggered in the most unexpected ways. I maintain a fairly large library of printed and electronic books (most of them DRMed -the light cases socially, kindle and Adobe locked the rest unfortunately) on subjects that interest me. It is fairly evident that I will not read them all, but I always have a book (and sometimes a paper) to recommend to a friend that has a problem. It seems that I am not the only one that thinks that personal libraries are supposed to be full of unread books.
Anyway, I was listening to Podcast.__init__ Episode 95 and one of the guests mentioned Parsing Techniques – A Practical Guide by Grune, I think it was when they touched Earley parsers and how most books about parsing do not really touch on how the actual parser is built. Wait a minute I’ve got that PDF! And you can go to the author’s site and download it. And you know what? There is a second edition out. For > 100 euros for a DRMed PDF I may not buy it since parsing is definitely not my thing, but somebody else out there might need the second edition. Judging from my skimming of the first edition, this is close to the encyclopaedia of parsing. I will go through some pages tonight.
Just for a refresher.
Managing organized complexity 