This book appears to be more of a "compiler-compiler design in C"; it goes through how to write a lexer and parser generator, then writes a compiler using them, and I think the resulting compiler is a bit of a letdown: it does not much more than translate C into a linearised subset of C, and so the IMHO more "interesting" and important parts of the back-end like register allocation and instruction selection are completely absent.

It's a good if somewhat outdated book if you're interested mostly in parsing and lexing, but for all the claims it makes in the preface about being practical instead of theoretical and all the source code presented throughout, I found the lack of actual Asm code generation (or any mentions of this compiler being able to compile itself) disappointing.

Parser/lexer generators also seem to have fallen out of favour for the creation of actual compilers, both big and small, at least for C-like languages; techniques based on recursive-descent (RD) are quite popular now.

On the "big, production-quality" side, gcc used a generated parser but moved to a handwritten RD-based one, and Clang always used RD. EDG's front-end, used in Intel's and other commercial compilers, is also handwritten RD. On the small "toy compiler"/hobbyist/experimentation side, there's TCC/OTCC, CC500 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8576068 ), C4 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558822 ), SubC ( http://www.t3x.org/subc/ ), and many others, all based on RD parsers.

In fact I can't think of any C compilers at the moment that are using a generated parser/lexer...