FWIW, a large chunk of the dragon book is about lexers and parsers, but from an automata theory perspective, where rather than creating a compiler, you're creating a compiler compiler, like lex for DFAs creating token streams from character streams, and yacc for PDAs creating trees from token streams.

But such detailed info isn't necessary even to write a compiler front end. It's good that the treatment exists, and that it's in the dragon book, but it's not what you need, even for parsing.