it appears the basic course I took at the university, is not nearly enough. is there a good basic practical book that would help me understand the principles of building a scanner/parser.
what I need is a down to earth book, heavy on examples and light on long winded theoretical-mathematical discussions
ANTLR, ANother Tool for Language Recognition, is a language tool that provides a framework for constructing recognizers, interpreters, compilers, and translators from grammatical descriptions containing actions in a variety of target languages.
.. The website contains plenty of documentation and examples. Including a course: http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/CS652/CS652+Home
This course concerns itself specifically with the implementation and translation of computer languages, leaving an in-depth study of language design to another course. Students will learn the formalisms behind computer languages, but the focus will be on developing the ability to build languages and their translators.
I was able to build a parser for CSS, using the reference grammar at http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/grammar.html and the tool at http://www.devincook.com/goldparser/
To do this I needed to, just slightly:
Adapt the reference grammar to match the syntax supported by the tool, described here: http://www.devincook.com/goldparser/doc/meta-language/index.htm
Do something with the ouput from one of the run-time engines described at http://www.devincook.com/goldparser/doc/index.htm (i.e., process the abstract syntax tree produced by the parser)
By doing this I incidentally learned something about parsing.
Alternatively, you might want the user manual for ANTLR (which is a more popular and perhaps a less easy-to-learn parser).
Back in 1983 I read Niklaus Wirth's paperback "Übersetzerbau", published in the Teubner Verlag. It described in a hands-on way building a compiler based on Recursive Descent. That's the book that really taught me compiler construction. Later on, in University, Aho/Sethi/Ullman became my favourite. I just searched Amazon, and it looks like in 1996 Wirth published an updated version in English. Look for Niklaus Wirth, "Compiler Construction", Addision Wesley, 1996, ISBN 978-0201403534. If it's as good as the German language predecessor, you should like it.
I recommend the dragon book or the book you used to learn compilers, plus a lex & yacc tutorial.
There are other books saying that they are more practical and have codes. But those codes are quite preliminary, there is no big gap between the principle and toy codes (although very big gap between principle and production codes)
Also I found the following course web page quite concise yet informative: http://flint.cs.yale.edu/cs421/
I read these slides when I was learning a compiler course.