Interesting series. Here's a different approach to code parsing which some people may find easier using Top Down Order Precedence:

http://javascript.crockford.com/tdop/tdop.html

The example explained on that page by Douglas Crockford (Yahoo's Javascript guru) is a TDOP parser written in Javascript thats parses Javascript (it's a concept demo, not a practical use case) What's nice about his example is he covers lots of different features like scope, functions, and objects, which are sometimes glossed over in other texts about how compilers work. This is not a complete compiler because it only produces a syntax tree, but going from syntax tree to interpreter/compiler is the easier part.