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johlstei comments on Progress on automated mathematical theorem proving? - Less Wrong
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I haven't studied the field in awhile, but back when I did, I got a lot from Advanced Compiler Design & Implementation by Steven Muchnick.
There is an unfortunate tendency, when teaching about compilers, to teach about components in the order they would be built in a project course, which puts a lot of undue emphasis on the boring solved problem of parsing. The layman's view of a compiler is that it translates from high-level languages to machine code; the reality is that it translates from a high-level language through a series of intermediate representations, each of which brings out some property that makes it amenable to optimizations; and these optimizations and representations are what make up the bulk of a compiler. A good litmus-test for understanding, is ability to translate a function into static single assignment (SSA) form.
For what it's worth, my compilers professor shared this complaint, and was vocal about it on the first day. He structured his class so that he gave us a (nearly) working compiler for a simple arithmetic language (with lex/yacc). Throughout the semester, we gradually added features to the language it compiled until it looked more like C. By giving us the BNF for the grammar in each assignment, expanding the given parser was trivial. It did mean that we were guided towards maintaining his pipeline stages instead of devising our own, but they changed more and more throughout the various projects. This also meant that poor design early on lead to a great deal of refactoring in later projects.