No, no book is good for that. You just need to pick a project and start coding. Interpreters are a fun place to begin. I'd suggest getting a parser generator an

No, no book is good for that. You just need to pick a project and start coding. Interpreters are a fun place to begin. I'd suggest getting a parser generator and reimplementing Lua or something. You'll want to look up stuff in the Cooper & Torczon book as you do this (like what an abstract syntax tree is), but I doubt it's useful to read it through or study it. Reading the code of existing compilers is also very helpful. (A word to the wise: Don't start with the source code of GCC or other industrial-strength compiler. :)) (This is my philosophy toward learning anything programming related, so maybe I'm just weird.)