I'd do the second half of the book, it's got plenty of important techniques that aren't taught in the first half.
Once you've done that, you can see how it's done "for real" in a production setting by reading the source code to Wren (by the same author). [0]
Wren's implementation maps very closely to the C implementation of Lox.
At that point, you're ready to do your own language. As far as compilation techniques go, you'll still be missing the "middle-end" of the compiler, which uses an SSA IR. I don't recommend implementing this yourself, I'd look into MLIR (from the LLVM project) if you want to actually work on the middle-end. You can create one or more dialects that are unique to your language, and implement your own compiler transformations. There are lots of existing papers and projects on GitHub demonstrating doing so.
Once you've done that, you can see how it's done "for real" in a production setting by reading the source code to Wren (by the same author). [0]
Wren's implementation maps very closely to the C implementation of Lox.
At that point, you're ready to do your own language. As far as compilation techniques go, you'll still be missing the "middle-end" of the compiler, which uses an SSA IR. I don't recommend implementing this yourself, I'd look into MLIR (from the LLVM project) if you want to actually work on the middle-end. You can create one or more dialects that are unique to your language, and implement your own compiler transformations. There are lots of existing papers and projects on GitHub demonstrating doing so.
[0] https://wren.io/