I found Peter Sestoft's "Programming Language Concepts for Software Developers" an enjoyable read. The book incrementally builds two compilers - one for Micro-ML and one for Micro-C. The implementation language is F#.

http://www.itu.dk/courses/BPRD/E2010/plcsd-0_50.pdf http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/martinesmann/Teaching-program...