Worth also mentioning Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom (craftinginterpreters.com) as a companion — it implements two interpreters in Java then C, covering a treewalk interpreter and a bytecode VM, and is freely available online. Together with this journey and nils-m-holm's Practical Compiler Construction mentioned above, you get a remarkably complete self-study path from parsing fundamentals all the way to code generation.

On the C vs typed language debate: C forces you to think about representation explicitly — no algebraic types to lean on, every tagged union is manual. That arguably teaches you more about what a compiler actually does structurally. But OCaml or Haskell's pattern matching makes the recursive descent so natural that it's worth attempting both if you have the time. They illuminate different things.