I’ve been reading Crafting Interpreters on and off for a long time, and I finally finished it tonight—what a wonderful journey! I highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning how interpreters and compilers are implemented.

The book walks you through building a tree-walk interpreter (in Java) and a single-pass compiler that generates bytecode for a stack-based virtual machine (in C)—all coded by hand!

It took me over 40 hours (and a bit of pain) to complete the book, especially during the compiler implementation. So take your time and be patient—it’s worth it.