Most people who criticize the Dragon (Compilers etc... by Aho et al.) book seem to focus on chapters 3 and 4 which are the chapters on lexical analysis and parsing. The book has 12 chapters. Whatever your feelings on the parsing techniques, the book covers WAY more than that. It has a really good introduction to code generation, syntax directed translation, control flow analysis, dataflow analysis, and local, global and whole program optimizations.
As someone who has quite a few books on compilers, program analysis, type theory, etc... I find the Dragon book an irreplaceable reference to this day. It has a breadth of content shared by very few other books. For instance, Muchnick's classic "Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation" is really good for analysis and optimization but neglects all front end topics. The only area where I believe the Dragon book is inadequate in is type theory (I recommend Types and Programming languages [TAPL] by Pierce and Semantics with Application by Nielson for a gentler intro).
As to parsing, its chapter on parsing (4) is not as "hip" has some people want. However, it is solid and will teach you how to do parsing. There are newer and fancier techniques not covered in Chapter 4 but in general most people would benefit just having a solid understanding of recursive descent parsing!
As someone who has quite a few books on compilers, program analysis, type theory, etc... I find the Dragon book an irreplaceable reference to this day. It has a breadth of content shared by very few other books. For instance, Muchnick's classic "Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation" is really good for analysis and optimization but neglects all front end topics. The only area where I believe the Dragon book is inadequate in is type theory (I recommend Types and Programming languages [TAPL] by Pierce and Semantics with Application by Nielson for a gentler intro).
As to parsing, its chapter on parsing (4) is not as "hip" has some people want. However, it is solid and will teach you how to do parsing. There are newer and fancier techniques not covered in Chapter 4 but in general most people would benefit just having a solid understanding of recursive descent parsing!