I've been programming for a few years now and I'm looking to more formally educate myself in general computer science. I've been told having a good grasp on compilers and interpreters can be useful for a wide variety of problems.
So far "Language Implementation Patterns" looks like it might be a promising alternative.
I also rather enjoyed Crafting a Compiler. I found the explanations and excercises to be much more practical and enjoyable than the dragon book, but the code authors present is mostly garbage and full of global variables, state mutations and design pattern heavy. Ignore the code and do the excercises yourself.
I always found the Dragon book to be too parsing-heavy which gets boring quickly. The books I listed spend far less time on parsing and much more on code generation and optimization which I find more enjoyable. YMMV.
It pretty much just glosses over parsing etc., and focuses on the semantics of a language, which IMHO is much more interesting.
Sure, if you're building a real language implementation, you will need a parser, but in a lot of ways it's the least interesting part.