Parsing, the syntactic analysis of language, has been studied extensively in computer science and computational linguistics. Computer programs and natural languages share an underlying theory of formal languages and require efficient parsing algorithms. This introduction reviews the theory of parsing from a novel perspective. It provides a formalism to capture the essential traits of a parser that abstracts from the fine detail and allows a uniform description and comparison of a variety of parsers, including Earley, Tomita, LR, Left—Corner, and Head—Corner parsers. The emphasis is on context—free phrase structure grammar and how these parsers can be extended to unification formalisms. The book combines mathematical rigor with high readability and is suitable as a graduate course text.