Yes - it's probably the case, because there is nice theory behind it (DFAs for lexing and grammars for parsing). What I can really recommend (and me and others

Yes - it's probably the case, because there is nice theory behind it (DFAs for lexing and grammars for parsing). What I can really recommend (and me and others have recommended it already countless times) is TECS: The elements of computing systems (also know as "Nand2Tetris"). Although it also covers other parts like the hardware stuff it lets you implement - an assembler - a VM - a compiler that compiles a simplified Java-like language to this VM It takes a bottom-up approach, but if you go through all projects you get a really good view about the big picture. However as it does code generation via an intermediate VM language it doesn't really touch register architectures as a compilation target. Anyway I highly recommend that book.