I try as hard as I can to turn even aspiring compiler writers away from the Dragon Book. You don't need a the theoretic underpinnings of 5 types of parsing to write a compiler, and I doubt anyone could use the Dragon Book to actually write a compiler.

I give an emphatic thumbs up to "Engineering a Compiler" (Cooper/Torczon) and also to the Appel books. They are fantastic, readable and digestable, and actually help get a compiler written.