Talk:Dragon Book

No no no. Dragon book for computer science should be this book. But to other fields, there is another book. -- Taku 01:26 Feb 27, 2003 (UTC)

We don't use nickname for the title of article in the first place. What kind of encyclopedia has an entry with dragon book, which is just a compiler book. It is not recognizable for general audience. -- Taku 01:34 Feb 27, 2003 (UTC)


 * You're right about the nickname thing; I see you've made a separate entry for the compiler book. It should be mentioned and linked on this page, however, because it is widely known in the CS field as the Dragon Book, because of the cover illustration, just like Programming Perl is known as the "camel book". Under your definition of "dragon book", this would be one for compilers. For CS in general it would probably by Donald Knuth's books on The Art of Computer Programming. -- Merphant 01:43 Feb 27, 2003 (UTC)
 * Do we have a page listing the 'named' books that are mentioned so often in CS? &mdash; B.Bryant 07:22, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

In Japanese the term, "dragon book", may refer to the foremost book in the field but it doesn't have that meaning in English -- and this *is* the English Wikipedia. -- Derek Ross

Yes, dragon book is a jargon but I believed that usage came from Japanese word, dragon book. Or no? Maybe we should simply redirect to compiler book until someone including me found other usage of dragon book in English. -- Taku 02:45 Feb 27, 2003 (UTC)

By the way, should we mention about usage of Dragon book in Japan? Because I found in The Americas:


 * Most Spanish language references consider there to be no separation between North America and South America but only one continent America. However, many Spanish speakers consider America del norte and America del sur to be separate continents. The use of America to refer to the New World as a whole is also sometimes used in English, such as in the common phrase "Columbus discovered America".

While we don't want a Japanese dictionary here, but if we will cover usage in non-English language, we probably need to mention about dragon book. -- Taku 02:51 Feb 27, 2003 (UTC)

I was interested to discover that the phrase had that meaning in Japanese, so I'm happy to see it in the article as it is an interesting fact. I just want people to be clear that the compiler book got the name because of the (evil) Dragon of Compiler Complexity drawn on its front cover, as Merphant said above -- Derek Ross

I understand. In Japanese, the must-read or classic definitive books are usually called dragon book, so I thought that compiler book is called in that reason. Or is that possible the designer of cover of the book konws that and applied it? Anyway, I couldn't find out any dragon book other than the compiler one so I think redirect is fine -- Taku 03:07 Feb 27, 2003 (UTC).

It's possible but I think it more likely that the designer was thinking of the old European legend of St George slaying the Dragon. Take a close look at the words written on various parts of the dragon and on the knight's arrmour and weapons (in the English edition anyway). They make it clear that this will soon be an ex-dragon -- Derek Ross

Purple Dragon
If confirmed, the speculation on the dragon and colour are over; see Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools --Mike Van Emmerik 23:13, 22 February 2006 (UTC)