The book that had the Cain/Hendrix "Small C" compiler, runtime library, assembler and tools was a fantastic resource that taught me C and compiler construction at the same time.

In general, reading (lots of) source code is a good way to learn how to do things in a new language, i.e. to move from the lexical and syntactical level to the level of idioms for problem-solving. On reflection, I find it strange that in programming teaching, larger pieces of existing well-written source code are never discussed/explained/critiqued.

Small C was the inspiration for SubC, a project of mine. It is pretty much a cleaned-up and slightly extended rewrite of Small C that compiles with few warnings on modern compilers. Also comes with a book.

http://t3x.org/subc/index.html (source code)

http://t3x.org/reload/index.html (book)