You don't have to dick with sub-par literature. Prof Krishnamurthi's 1st-rate book is already available for free. It's Essentials of Programming Languages-like but much more approachable.

http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/

Stuff like John Cranshaw's tutorial is outdated. If you know a modicum of Lisp you can start hacking languages in no time.

His post is an attempt to make money on the affiliate program for this book. Check the link at the bottom of the post, it's a clickbank link.

This shouldn't be on the front page of HN

I like starting with designing a VM. It lets you short-circuit many of the nasty parts of code emission and results in a portable language off the bat. One of my big backburner projects is a simplified virtual game console designed to be a Forth machine. I've built a compiler for a very simple dialect of Forth, and I've started using it as a testbed for more sophisticated compilers- so far I have toy compilers for FORTRAN and a TinyBASIC with plans for an ALGOL-60 implementation and a classical Lisp.

Perhaps this will interest someone: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Mako

Programming language design and implementation is awesome and terrifying. I did exactly this for my senior project, a language called [fuga](http://github.com/fmota/fuga) that is based on [Io](http://iolanguage.com/). I learned so much.

But beware. Language design is a bottomless pit from which you must climb if you wish to implement anything.