[chin7an]

I’ve not read this book, so can’t offer a comparison but Thorsten Ball’s two books [1] are great.

The dragon book was my textbook in college, brings back memories, might be outdated but some concepts should still be useful.

[1] https://thorstenball.com/books/

[signaru]

Thorsten Ball's books are the closest thing to Crafting Interpreters. Not just by topic, but also with how the code is presented. By far these are among the few books I know that take the effort to guide the reader to programming something complex from scratch, while also being testable as the program grows. This means that previously presented code changes along the way as new features are added.

A lot of other "code yourself" books, on the other hand, simply slice already finished codebases, and there's no way to test a simpler incomplete version of the program unless the reader makes extra effort and go beyond what is presented in the book.

While there is a lot of overlapping topics in Nystrom's and Ball's books, there are also enough differences to learn something new from the other. Ball's books uses the same parser and AST as front ends to both tree-walking and VM interpreter. CI, on the other hand, skips the AST for the VM interpreter, and also teaches extra topics like implementing garbage collection, dictionaries/hashtables and class-based OOP.