I love parsing and have made a lot of parsers, but never a typical programming language parser. It's interesting that most of the literature (from academic papers to blog posts) focuses programming language parsers, but the vast majority of parsers out there deal with other things. I had to really figure things out myself, and that's been the same story for every parser I've written.

A lesson I have to relearn every time: while you can always skip lexing (which is really just another parser), it almost always screws you over to do so.