The dragon book will teach you all about how to write your own lexer + parser generator (which I found quite fascinating), but you don't need to know about NFAs

The dragon book will teach you all about how to write your own lexer + parser generator (which I found quite fascinating), but you don't need to know about NFAs/DFA construction etc. One of the most fun projects I made inspired by the Dragon Book was a small grep implementation that was building up an NFA from a regular expression parsed by recursive descent and than simulating the NFA using an algorithm with two stacks described in the book :) It's just that it takes a lot of time to get something practical running starting from just the Dragon Book, and it can be discouraging given how much effort it takes to read it. Overall I can second everything you say, though.