Welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for Building User-Friendly DSLs!

This book is written for developers interested in unlocking the potential of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) to improve their daily software development life. To get through this book at a good clip, you’ll need to have some skills in and experience with software development, preferably using modern JavaScript. You’ll learn most if you go through the text with a development environment at hand, trying out the code, and doing the exercises.

DSLs have been around for a very long time - in fact, one can argue that they even predate the advent of computers.

Since then they seem to have gone through the Gartner hype cycle several times. It’s therefore curious that learning about DSLs is usually confined to the more challenging parts of university Computer Science curricula. I find that books available on the market either assume too much prior Computer Science knowledge, are not practical enough, rely on a very specific piece of technology, or any combination of those. This book is the result of the desire to try and fix that situation.