If you're looking to use powerful, higher level tools rather than building everything yourself, going through the projects and readings for this course is a pretty good option. It's a languages course by the author of the Java parser engine ANTLR. You can get the book for the course as a PDF from the Pragmatic Programmers.
The course goes over the standard compiler compiler stuff that you'd see elsewhere: parsing, types and type checking, polymorphism, symbol tables, and code generation. Pretty much the only thing that isn't covered is optimizations. The final project is a program that compiles a subset of C. Because you use tools like ANTLR and LLVM, it's feasible to write the entire compiler in a single day (I have an existence proof of this, though I do mean ~24 hours). It's heavy on practical engineering using modern tools, a bit lighter on theory.
LLVM, by the way, is simply fantastic. Many situations where you might normally compile down to assembly, you'd be much better off compiling to LLVM's Intermediate Representation instead. It's higher level, cross platform, and LLVM is quite good at generating optimized assembly from it.
