Book to substitute "Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools" by Ullman et. al. (popularly known as the red dragon book)
The &quot;problem&quot; with the dragon book is that it is so complete; intentionally so. Over its lifetime there have been tremendous advances in the theory and practice of building compilers. If you want &quot;state of the art&quot;, then you want the dragon book, probably a later (harder) edition, even.
But it is a bit much, as you have seen, for a first course, or an overview of compiling. It is often used in graduate courses, for example, and, even then, in a follow up course to one in Language Principles which discusses much of the underlying theory separately.
While it is hard to find and a bit expensive, one of the best books for an introduction, and separately a bit of real literature in CS, get a copy of Brinch Hansen's On Pascal Compilers. It shows how to build a compiler as well as a machine to execute the code using Recursive Descent Parsing, which is easy to understand and suitable for LL languages (with a few extensions for non LL features).
Most commercial compilers use LR compiling techniques even if the language is LL, simply for efficiency reasons, but the theory is much harder as are the compilers. For state of the art understanding you need to delve into LR, but for a first introduction, LL is enough, and easy to understand.
LL compiling is also called Predictive Parsing, since it is easy to look at a language statement and choose a method for translating it, usually using keywords. The suitable languages for LL parsing are also easy for a human to read and understand. If a language (feature) absolutely demands LR parsing, then it will be difficult for a person to read.
For example, the Dangling Else Problem in if statements is a consequence of the construct not being LL, though  LL parsers usually have special hacks to handle this common construct.
Once you can handle Hansen's book, the dragon book won't be so daunting.