Wirth also wrote an extremely accessible book on Compiler Construction, using exactly the hand written recursive descent parsing approach discussed by OP.

The initial edition was published in 1976, in German, but the latest version is available online:

https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/Compil...

There are also parser generators like ANTLR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANTLR) which take an input not unlike yacc, but generate a LL parser using explicit code, rather than the table driven LALR parsing of yacc.