I highly recommend Modern Compiler Implenentation in ML by Andrew Appel (he is also an inventor of a number of important modern compilation techniques). I also

I highly recommend Modern Compiler Implenentation in ML by Andrew Appel (he is also an inventor of a number of important modern compilation techniques). I also rather enjoyed Crafting a Compiler. I found the explanations and excercises to be much more practical and enjoyable than the dragon book, but the code authors present is mostly garbage and full of global variables, state mutations and design pattern heavy. Ignore the code and do the excercises yourself. I always found the Dragon book to be too parsing-heavy which gets boring quickly. The books I listed spend far less time on parsing and much more on code generation and optimization which I find more enjoyable. YMMV.