Comments on: Review of “ANSI Common Lisp”

By: Everything You Need To Get Started With Common Lisp | So Jake Says

Everything You Need To Get Started With Common Lisp | So Jake Says — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:08:31 +0000

[...] 3) A Lisp tutorial or reference. I highly recommend “ANSI Common Lisp” by Paul Graham [see my review]. [...]

By: Lisp is Changing My C++ | So Jake Says

Lisp is Changing My C++ | So Jake Says — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 04:01:59 +0000

[...] up, Graham. I taught myself from “ANSI Common Lisp“. At first, I attacked the problems in the book from a C++ perspective, trying to wedge loops [...]

By: Kate

Kate — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:19:52 +0000

I strongly second the recommendation for Practical Common Lisp. I own it as well as both of PG’s books and I think it’s a significantly better introduction to the language and develops a reasonable-scale application through its course. Seibel of course had the benefit of PG’s books coming first, but I think he really did do a better job with teaching Lisp than previous books. I’d still recommend to anyone learning CL buying ANSI Common Lisp and downloading On Lisp if you can’t find it, but Practical Common Lisp is the place to start.

By: JS

JS — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 03:19:48 +0000

Guy L. Steele’s “Common Lisp: the language 2nd Ed.” may also be of use to you. The book is found here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/cltl2.html

By: Martin C. Martin

Martin C. Martin — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:13:46 +0000

You might want to read Paul Graham’s “On Lisp”, which is available free at:

http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

He wrote it before ANSI Common Lisp, and it covers the more advanced topics in Lisp, mostly metaprogramming, but also functional programming.

By: Richard Reed

Richard Reed — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:04:54 +0000

Nice review. I’ve also decided to learn Lisp this summer, although I ended up going with Practical Common Lisp as a text instead.

I’d like to point out that while Peter Norvig still recommends Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming as a Lisp text, he no longer recommends it as an AI text and instead the more recent book he cowrote, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach [ http://norvig.com/Lisp-retro.html end of the article] It tends to be light on the programming and mostly use pseudo code, but it is an excellent AI text that covers a lot of area. Unless you really, really want it as a Lisp book here, I’d recommend this AI: A Modern Approach.

By: Justin Paston-Cooper

Justin Paston-Cooper — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:23:50 +0000

I’m working at a company that uses Lisp, as an intern, this summer. I wouldn’t recommend ANSI Common Lisp as a book from which to teach programming to oneself, but I definitely find it to be a very good reference book. I find a lot that many of the definitions given in the Hyperspec are not descriptive enough, or maybe sometimes rather cryptic. It definitely explains things well, and I’d recommend it to anyone who does a lot of programming in Lisp.

By: Wavell

Wavell — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:33:33 +0000

I would recommend “Practical Common Lisp” but after seeing your other posts it looks like you are one of those guys that would probably like SICP and PAIP more.

By: waplington

waplington — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:35:33 +0000

Hi, I really enjoyed your review.

Paul Graham’s other book “On Lisp” does cover closures in great detail and is available as a free pdf from his site.

With regard to the problem of finding “the longest finite walk in a graph, cycles allowed”: I think that what Paul intended is for you consider graphs that contain cycles – the walk should not contain a cycle itself.

Best of luck with Dr Norvig’s tome!

By: Mikael Jansson

Mikael Jansson — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 08:01:00 +0000

I can highly recomend the book Practical Common Lisp, by Peter Seibel (http://gigamonkeys.com/book). It was /the/ book that got me into Lisp. I got the hardcopy, but it’s also freely available online.

(Disclaimer: I haven’t read anything by PG yet, mostly because of criticism of his Lisp-style.)