If you are interested in writing a compiler for a functional language (rather than a procedural one) Simon Peyton-Jones and David Lester's "Implementing functional languages: a tutorial" is an excellent guide.
The conceptual basics of how functional evaluation works is guided by examples in a simple but powerful functional language called "Core". Additionally, each part of the Core language compiler is explained with code examples in Miranda (a pure functional language very similar to Haskell).
Several different types of compilers are described but even if you only follow the so-called template compiler for Core you will have an excellent understanding of what makes functional programming tick.
