Martin Fowler

There was a requirement at my work to do something similar so I definitely found the book very insightful. I also learned how and where I can use some of these patterns/templates.

If you're new to DSL and want to delve into it, this book provides very strong basics - lexers, parsers, syntax tree and code generators. Simple language and detailed code examples helped me grasp the concepts with ease.

The author repeated the part of building the semantic model a little too often and I felt that Language Workbenches could have been a book by itself that includes details on how something like that could be implemented.… (more)

I picked up this book at the wrong time. The book was so successful that a second edition is due out on November 30, 2018 (less than two weeks from now).

On the other hand, I picked up this book at the right time. At work, my project is in the midst of a refactoring project. I am in the middle of changing PHP code from modular functions to object-orientation. The aim of this transition is to enhance the scalability of the project and ease the writing of documentation. I generally like to peer "beneath the surface" of skills that I acquire; this book has indeed enlightened my mind to details of what is going on in my code rewrite.

Some of this book is incredibly tedious. It details how to change code from one format to another. It's work that I let my fingers do more of - and my brain less of! But the book also frames how to do this work and why it is so important. It ties together intellectual "loose ends" which might not be tied together by the programmer who simply dives "head first" into the project.

Fowler writes in tandem with a research seminar at the University of Illinois who have pioneered object-oriented techniques in Smalltalk and then Java and C . They tackle the concepts of refactoring more than how to tackle the specifics of coding in a language. I prefer their theoretical approach to more common approaches drenched in technical lingo and programming tools. This book was worth its time.
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