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ANSI Common LISP (Prentice Hall Series in Artificial Intelligence)
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ANSI Common LISP (Prentice Hall Series in Artificial Intelligence) |
Author: Paul Graham
Published: 1995-11-12 |
List price: $74.00
Our price: $66.60
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As of: September 06th, 2008 01:43:41 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 thought provoking
This is not an introduction to programming book. Instead it describes how an experienced programmer can use CL. As such, it is very dense. Descriptions of new operators are part of the text, rather than displayed in figures (there is a good reference at the back). This keeps the book small though.
Perhaps the most profound ideas in the book are bottom up programming (modify the language to add the commands you need), coding at the highest-level possible until the problem is well understood, and that code comments have cost:
"Good code, like good prose, comes from constant rewriting...Interlinear comments make programs stiff and diffuse, and so inhibit the evolution of what they describe"
As for downsides, I found the exercises for each chapter to be uneven. One asks us to create a function that returns a copy of a queue, later we're asked to detect car-circular lists, yikes.
 Pragmatic
Paul Graham does a great job of reminding readers in practical ways that designing programs means examining trade-offs of performance, memory use, and simplicity. I appreciate any computer science book that not only introduces a language but also drives the reader toward developing a thought process that will make them implement great solutions in any programming language.
When I Hack Lisp this book is with me
Once you move beyond the very basics of Lisp this is a great book to have around. It has nice to the point examples of how to perform common and uncommon tasks in Lisp. In the back of the book there is a small description of the commonly used functions for Lisp. The brievity and size of the book plus the density of the material presented makes for a excellent book to have at your side while you are coding. I wouldn't recommend it for developers or anyone who has never seen Lisp code before but once you are beyond that stage it is an excellent bargin
a very expressive language
Common Lisp is a bit of a throwback. And so is this book, from 95. There is absolutely no graphics described for Common Lisp here. Not unlike Fortran, C or C++. Here you get a "pure" language, without all that user interface fluff. The lack of an update to this book in 10 years also reflects the stability of Common Lisp. Veterans of C or Fortran should recognise this.
The language itself will be radically different to many readers, if they hail from a typical C, C++ or Java background. Very flexible and powerful. Plus, the code can be nicely compact. In some qualitative sense, you might say that Lisp has more expressive power than many other languages, per some unit length of source code.
The numerous problems should be appreciated by the diligent reader. And they should be tackled.
Great book for a rather powerful yet misunderstood language
I'm a programmer comming from a procedural and OOP background. Some features of Lisp are completely mind-blowing if not right out bizzarre. Even if you're not in the field of AI, Neural Nets, etc. This book teaches you how to use Lisp as a "common," all purpose language.
Grahams's style and exposition are bar-none. As some one already said, the examples might come across as simplistic or even trivial. But after realizing what the author was actually trying to accomplish, one realizes that the examples are actually quite fitting.
I tried (and returned/exchanged) three other Lisp books because they were either too broad and shallow or too specific. This book, however, has a great mix of breath/depth that makes the learning curve a bit more gentle and thus making this book (and more importantly, the language) accessible to anyone with a bit of programming background.
This book is among my must-buy-must-keep list of computer books. Highly recommend.
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