I've studied math books this way. Never a whole book, but certainly sections or chapters here and there. I found it gave me a much improved appreciation for the high level structure of the material (or at least of it's presentation).
I think of your area (compilers) not as outside the front-end/back-end dichotomy, but (to your point) outside the the world of web-apps, etc.
The front-end/back-end lens can be applied to compilers -- just the "front-end" (invocation options, error/status messages, maybe IDE integrations) is very thin, compared to the "back-end" (i.e., everything else).
aka the (postulated) Lindy Effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect