Not sure how to write a compiler

I've been interested in writing a very simple compiler, just arithmetic statements and such, but I'm unable to understand the majority of what I've found. Most of the books recommended to me are theory-heavy and I feel that they would be of little use if I don't even know how to implement a compiler. Following Crenshaw's tutorial in Pascal is proving difficult as I'm struggling to sufficiently convert the Pascal to C. Can anyone recommend a practice-heavy source for me to learn from about writing a very simple compiler in C or even Python?