I think engineering a compiler is a better book. The dragon book has a few places which are really good and then a few places which were an afterthought shoved

I think engineering a compiler is a better book. The dragon book has a few places which are really good and then a few places which were an afterthought shoved in there later like SSA (which is really important). We are due a new batch of compiler books. As the utility of investment in compilers has decreased we are stuck with books mostly expecting x86 to die and be replaced with potentially statically schedulable machines so a lot of time is spent on algorithms that are really really fuzzy on a modern core. Muchnick is a still a Bible for optimizations but it's written in a bizarre pseudo-language which means many algorithms are rather inpenetrable. JITs are not very well covered in the literature. There's a lot of subtle variations in how they design their IRs these days.