Hello,
there should be out a new book "On Lisp, Advanced Techniques" published
by Prentice Hall.
Any infos? Opinions?
Greetings from Hamburg,
Rainer Joswig
In article <···················@kifpmac5.informatik.uni-hamburg.de> ······@informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Rainer Joswig) writes:
there should be out a new book "On Lisp, Advanced Techniques" published
by Prentice Hall.
Any infos? Opinions?
On Lisp: Advanced Techniques for Common Lisp
Paul Graham
Prentice-Hall, 1994
ISBN 0-13-030552-9
I am a Lisp newbie, so caveat lector.
I like (so far) the author's attitude and style. He is clearly excited
about Lisp and its capabilities and is not shy about touting its advantages
over the standard imperative languages, C, Pascal and their children.
His writing is clear and concise. There is appropriate use of examples to
illustrate his points.
[From the Preface] "The theme of this book is twofold: that Lisp is a
natural language for programs written in the bottom-up style, and that the
bottom-up style is a natural way to write Lisp programs." His main point
is that a bottom-up style is a different way of writing programs which
offer significant advantages over the trad C-Pascal way.
Also, "Mastering macros is one of the most important steps in moving from
writing correct Lisp programs to writing beautiful ones. ... One of the
aims of this book is to collect in one place all that people have till now
had to learn from experience about macros."
Finally, I liked John Foderaro's quote,
Lisp is a programmable programming language.
because it seems to me to express why Scheme & Lisp are so much superior to
C-Pascal.
The only drawback I can see, for a newbie, is that I'm having to go off and
learn Lisp from another book (Lisp/3e, Winston & Horn) before I can
continue! I'm looking forward to completing Graham's book.
It is clearly destined to be a widely acknowledged classic On Lisp.
The Chapters:
1: The Extensibe Language
2: Functions
3: Functional Programming
4: Utility Functions
5: Returning Functions
6: Functions as Representations
7: Macros
8: When to use Macros
9: Variable Capture
10: Other Macro Pitfalls
11: Classic Macros
12: Generalized Variables
13: Computation at Compile-Time
14: Anaphoric Macros
15: Macros Returning Functions
16: Macro-Defining Macros
17: Read-Macros
18: Destructuring
19: A Query Compiler
20: Continuations
21: Multiple Processes
22: Nondeterminism
23: Parsing with ATNs
24: Prolog
25: Object-Oriented Lisp
-- Vladimir, former hide-bound programmer
--
Vladimir G. Ivanovic SunPro
(415) 336-2315 MTV12-33
········@Eng.Sun.COM 2550 Garcia Ave.
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Disclaimer: I speak for myself.