If your goal is to work with an interpreted language, I would leave reading about compilation until later. This is often how it is taught in university courses,

If your goal is to work with an interpreted language, I would leave reading about compilation until later. This is often how it is taught in university courses, the first being learning language theory and implementing interpreted languages, and the second on theory and implementation issues of compiled languages. Others have already suggested SICP and PLAI, and these are great. PLAI is in the manner of what the first course would cover, and SICP does a bit of both. Two more I know of are Scheme from Scratch http://michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch-introduction http://michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch-introduction Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_... There was a good video at PyCon US 2013 this year So you want to write an interpreter? http://pyvideo.org/video/1694/so-you-want-to-write-an-interpreter http://pyvideo.org/video/1694/so-you-want-to-write-an-interp... It gives a forty minute, high level overview of what is done to implement an interpreted language.