"This article presents two strategies as two different ways to implement a virtual machine that executes a regular expression that has been compiled into text-matching bytecodes, just like .NET and Mono are different ways to implement a virtual machine that executes a program that has been compiled into CLI bytecodes."

This has been around for a while but this is one of the best essays on computing science that I have ever read, and Dijkstra was the perfect candidate to write it.

Full book PDF. It appears to provide the sweet spot of appealing to one who doesn't know a lot about compilers, but wants to.

Douglas Crockford explains a parsing technique that works well with dynamic, functional languages, like javascript.