General Structure of the Book: In the table of contents the chapters are divided into four parts. These parts merely represent my estimate of the difficulty of the chapters: I think that any first year student should be able to cope with the ones in Part One. I have used most of the programs in Parts One and Two as teaching examples in a course for students without any prior programming experience. In the same course, students with prior experience had to do the exercises at the end of the chapters. I have used most of the programs dealing with parsing, translating and interpreting in several compiler courses at various levels, for students with one to three years of prior experience. At the other extreme, the programs in Part Four have been challenging to students at Honours level.
The chapters are not self-contained but cumulative - many of them refer back to problems and techniques stated and solved in a simpler form in earlier chapters. On the other hand, the programs in most chapters are self-contained. There are so few instances where a procedure in an earlier program could be used without change in a later program that it has not been thought worthwhile to introduce any kind of a library of simple common procedures. There is only one exception to this: three quite different programs in Part Four use a common collection of utilities.
Here is some more information about the book: