There's a lot of theory about "bla grammars bla bla translators bla ... context-free context-dependent bla bla etc".
You can just throw that Dragon Book out the window and study the grammar of some small language like Basic or JavaScript's grammar to learn stuff
(here you can find a lot of grammars to many many languages).
This is not rocket science, it's engineering.
So I totally agree with you about not wanting to read 9999 books on the subject, you need to build something.
I'm not in any way a compiler/language expert but I do feel that you want to get down to business
so.. here's Parse::Yapp, here's an article , here's another article , here's some benchmarks and comparisons between different parser generators for Perl,
and another comparison , and another article. If you have further questions, I'm sure the monastery has lots of monks with knowledge of Parse::Yapp
so your questions will receive an answer.
Now go write a language and good luck !