Like the title says, this is a reference book for the latest version of ANTLR . However, it also does a decent job of introducing ANTLR to someone new.

While you can certainly find some of the information about ANTLR on its website or mailing list, this book contains a lot more examples especially on the thorny aspects of language parsers. In fact, the strong point of this book is abundant set of examples that it presents.

However, don’t expect everything to be crystal clear to you the first time you finish reading the book (unless you have used some other parser generator before). In fact, it might be hard to read this book cover-to-cover the first time. The best approach is to quickly skim the sections so that you have a rough idea of what is possible with ANTLR and where to find that information. Then you can refer to the relevant sections when you are facing some problems.

This book is best used in conjunction with some project on the side (the book itself already contain some full-fledged project but you can find more on the ANTLR website). As you tweak your language, you can refer to it for details on how to fix problems that you are having with the language that you are developing. Its usefulness begins to shine when you need to use some of the more advanced features of ANTLR which are not documented anyway else. I am constantly surprised by the wealth of information in this book; most of the time when I run into a problem, the book contains a section that describes that problem and potential solutions.

If you are using ANTLR for a large project, this book definitely becomes indispensable. Use it as your primary source of reference and refer to the ANTLR wiki/ documentation /mailing list if you have more esoteric questions.