KEY BENEFIT: Teaching users new and more powerful ways of thinking about programs, this two-in-one text contains a tutorial—full of examples—that explains all the essential concepts of Lisp programming, plus an up-to-date summary of ANSI Common Lisp, listing every operator in the language. Informative and fun, it gives users everything they need to start writing programs in Lisp both efficiently and effectively, and highlights such innovative Lisp features as automatic memory management, manifest typing, closures, and more. Dividing material into two parts, the tutorial half of the book covers subject-by-subject the essential core of Common Lisp, and sums up lessons of preceding chapters in two examples of real applications: a backward-chainer, and an embedded language for object-oriented programming. Consisting of three appendices, the summary half of the book gives source code for a selection of widely used Common Lisp operators, with definitions that offer a comprehensive explanation of the language and provide a rich source of real examples; summarizes some differences between ANSI Common Lisp and Common Lisp as it was originally defined in 1984; and contains a concise description of every function, macro, and special operator in ANSI Common Lisp. The book concludes with a section of notes containing clarifications, references, and additional code. For computer programmers.
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Audience: This should probably not be the first programming book that you read, but it could easily be the second. Graham describes Common Lisp in detail, but assumes no prior knowledge of the language. This is a good book for people learning Lisp independently, for any application. Intermediate-level programmers will benefit from seeing Graham's Lisp style, which emphasizes building utilities to create a 'language' suitable for your problem.
Organization: The strongest point. Examples are keyed in well with the text: binary search trees in the data structures chapter, string substitution in the I/O chapter, ray tracing in the numbers chapter, etc. Okay, sure, there's nothing fancy there; obviously writers choose relevant examples. The impressive thing is how the examples are high-quality Lisp programs of the sort that might actually be used, even the ones from the early chapters (before the entire language is available). This is not the most common pedagogical approach, but it works here.
Possible shortcomings: There is nothing wrong with the problems per se, but most of them can be solved with very short programs. There are some great large-scale programs towards the end: an roll-your-own object system, an HTML generator, Lisp-in-Lisp; but on the other hand, you're on your own when the time comes to think of projects to try yourself.
As far as the reference section goes, it's okay, but why not just use the HyperSpec?
I would place it as the best Common Lisp reference you can get in dead tree form!
Pros:
- Good Summary and practice questions at the end of each chapter
- Great example code, that actually does something useful
- Great introduction to the CLOS
- Teaches you how to use Common lisp as a general purpose language, like Java and C++, rather than shoehorning it as an AI only language like other texts do.
Cons:
- No reference on setting up a lisp environment, that is up to the reader
- Not a great introductory text, though in its defence the book doesn't claim to be
- Short Macro section, though the author has written another book that fully describes macros
The book is small and the topic large, so some coverage of things is a bit thin. So what -- the Hyperspec is free.
The book is extremely practical, dealing with how to write programs and use the language. It is *extremely* handy to refer to while programming; this is not true of the Hyperspec. Hence this book is a must-have.
Also strongly recommended (especially if you don't know why Lisp is so wonderful) is "On Lisp", by Paul Graham. He shows the completely unmatched power of Lisp. Out of print, you can get for free on Graham's website -- go to yahoo to find it.
Give the history and a rich set of unique programming features lisp offers, it's... Read more
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