Excellent set of articles for someone trying to figure out bare basics of compilers without taking it in college.  For a long time (before going to college) I was fascinated with the idea  of how languages are implemented. I found this tutorial and followed along. About 3 articles in, the light bulb went on over my head and I finally 'got' recursive descent parsing and how simple and elegant it was. I didn't learn much else from the articles but it was worth it for that.