This book covers the fundamentals concepts of formal languages and compilation. The book presents the subject in a clear, reader-friendly and simple minimalist way, presenting the principles and methods used for defining the syntax of artificial languages and to implement simple translators, as well as in designing syntax-directed translators. Features: Unifies the concepts and notations used in the various approaches of parsing algorithms; concepts are illustrated with many realistic examples, to ease the understanding of the theory and the transfer to application; theoretical models of automata, transducers and formal grammars are used extensively; algorithms are described in a pseudo-code to avoid the disturbing details of a programming language, yet they are straightforward to convert to executable procedures; problems and solutions are available via an author website. This comprehensive and clearly written text will be welcomed by graduate students as the ideal guide to the fundamentals of this field.