Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37910 in Books
• Published on: 1995-11-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Amazon.com Review
This book provides an excellent introduction to Common Lisp. In addition to chapters covering the basic language concepts, there are sections discussing the Common Lisp object system (CLOS) and speed considerations in Lisp. Three fair-sized examples of nontrivial Lisp projects are also included. The book's clear and engaging format explains complicated constructs simply. This format makes ANSI Common Lisp accessible to a general audience--even those who have never programmed before. The book also provides an excellent perspective on the value of using Lisp.

From the Publisher
Teaching students new and more powerful ways of thinking about programs, this 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 students 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.

From the Back Cover
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.

Customer Reviews

The must have book for Lisp programmers
If you are interested in Lisp, you must get this book right after finishing Practical Common Lisp.

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.