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1. Programming Language Processors in Java: Compilers and Interpreters http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~daw/books/PLPJ/

2. The definitive ANTLR reference http://www.pragprog.com/titles/tpantlr

1. gives you a good introduction in how to write parsers from scratch (without lex/yacc'ish parsing frameworks), and is probably a good warm-up before the book you mention.

2. gives you an introduction to state-of-the parsing with a framework (antlr) + a some about compilation. Note: antlr also has a nice IDE for rapid developing/prototyping of parsers - antlrworks. See http://antlr.org for more info.

A very nice parsing framework for Python is dparser. It allows you to write grammars as docstrings to methods, which makes it very easy to try out things http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-cpdpars.ht... http://dparser.sourceforge.net/

Definite Clause Grammars for Prolog is also worth a look (at least for reference)