Very tangential, but I took a compiler course my senior year of college. It was a graduate level with (in my opinion) one of the best professors in the department. He maintains a known-name ML compiler (not NJ) and has studied language theory his entire career, plus he's an excellent teacher and general person.

I worked my ass off in the class and it was a blast. Aced all the projects and almost all the homework assignments. The exams were fine too, except one section, parsing algorithms.

I had just started seeing a girl the week before our week on LR, LALR, LL, etc, and my mind did a lot of wandering during those two lectures. I had everything down for that class, except I had so little knowledge of parsing algorithms. I didn't realize how little I knew until the exam where I lost 30 points to parsing questions. That ended up dropping me to an A-.

Now whenever I see parsing algorithms mentioned, I get a little laugh. Time with a girl was definitely worth the missed points for a nerdy computer science student.

This is the site (I believe - there were a few) I used to help scrape a basic understanding together to prep me for the final exam, so I definitely recommend.