did you read it on your own? Or as a part of a uni course? It it a classic, sure, but it's definitely not a book to recommend to beginners. Many compiler engineers and academics think the book is... Outdated a bit.
The book is very imperative and doesn't really know much about modern abstractions for data structures.
Something like https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_... is probably more fun for a beginner these days. (Languages in the ML family are really well suited to writing parsers, interpreters and compilers. That what that family of languages was designed for.)
2. Essentials of Compilation (Siek)
A very easy way in would be a venerable Wirth's "Compiler Contruction", which takes a simplistic approach, e.g. concentrating on getting the result out as fast as possible.
Somewhat similar, crisp in style and exposition, would be Nystrom's "Crafting Interpreters". It explains modern interpreter kind of language implementation (Python, JS, PHP and others), which includes compiling to bytecode and bytecode VM. There is a free online version of the book.
Now, compilers are one of the oldest area of computer-related software research. There are many good books, numerous approaches and schools. Any recommendation should take concrete student's background into account. Say, improving a massive modern compiler backend requires a very different kind of recommendation compared with a make-my-own-language project.