Ask HN: Best books on building a programming language

Crafting Interpreters is a good recommendation

Crafting interpreters. Very well written and free of cost, but ofc I’d recommend purchasing a copy.

"Writing an Interpreter in Go" (and it's followup about writing a virtual machine) is a good addition.

The main book I can recommend is Types and Programming Languages by Pierce.

I tried reading the dragon book in my teens, never really understood it, it was too much theory for me.

it's followup about writing a virtual machine

Another book: Game Scripting Mastery.

There is "Building a Debugger"