Uni CS lecturer here. One of my mentors in grad school was the compiler professor, and I learned a lot from him. I also got a chance to actually teach compilers for the fist time last year and it was one of the most difficult courses I have ever taught. Used the dragon book and had my students create their own lexer/parser based on an invented language that I came up with.
Compilers is one of the few topics that none of my colleagues seem care about, but IMHO it's so very important to learn how to do. In my Uni, the course only gets taught once every few years (it didn't help that our last department chair didn't care for the course at all and never scheduled it).
I count the day that I finished my LL(1) parser and lexer for my own compiler course as a student as the day I "earned" my chops.
Compilers is one of the few topics that none of my colleagues seem care about, but IMHO it's so very important to learn how to do. In my Uni, the course only gets taught once every few years (it didn't help that our last department chair didn't care for the course at all and never scheduled it).
I count the day that I finished my LL(1) parser and lexer for my own compiler course as a student as the day I "earned" my chops.
Edit: Since there seems to be some discussion on this thread, I'll throw in the actual project that I gave my students (warts and all). https://github.com/agiacalone/cecs-444-semester-project