The dragon book saw multiple revisions. The authors always stayed on the theoretical, almost detached, side of things. Most of the deeper material is dedicated to things closer to theory of computation than practical compiler building. Practical stuff is shallow at best.

The tiger book, otoh, does a great job of leading the reader all the way from high level stuff to a realistic functional language compiler. And Appel, by the way, is a great technical writer - even his whitepapers are a pleasure to read.

I have great respect for dragon book authors but... their writing un the book and elsewhere is not a pinnacle of clarity.

Some would discard it given its age, even so.