From: Zachary Turner
Subject: books on lisp
Date: 
Message-ID: <743sru$7g6$1@uuneo.neosoft.com>
what are some good books for learning lisp, preferably books aimed at
someone who's _never_ touched lisp before.  i've got about 5 years doing
programming in c/c++, 3 in x86 assembly, and some java so i'm by no means a
newbie to programming, but i would like something aimed at the newbie to
lisp.  preferably a book that has a few programming exercises at the end of
each chapter saying "write a function that does blah".  I looked on
amazon.com and the few that I could find that were aimed towards the novice
were given bad reviews by novices saying that the books were too hard and
poorly worded.  Any recommendations?

Zachary Turner

From: Raffael Cavallaro
Subject: Re: books on lisp
Date: 
Message-ID: <raffael-0312980011570001@raffaele.ne.mediaone.net>
In article <············@uuneo.neosoft.com>, "Zachary Turner"
<·······@elsitech.com> wrote:

>Any recommendations?

_ANSI Common Lisp_  by Paul Graham.

_Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common
Lisp_ by Peter Norvig.

You can find both by searching by title or author at amazon.com.

BTW, I feel I'm qualified to give reccommendations here because:

1. I'm a pretty rank lisp amateur myself, so I know what beginners can and
can't be expected to "get." You should be able to follow Graham's _ANSI
Common Lisp_ I'd be surprised if you could follow his _On Lisp_ right off
the bat (but look at it later, by all means).

2. I went through just about every Lisp book published in the past two
decades when I first started learning Lisp, and boy, were there a lot of
blind alleys.


From a perspective of personal tase, I love Graham's ANSI Common Lisp
because it's compact (smallish format paperback), it has a good (if terse)
reference section on the ANSI standard, and I like Graham's succinct
writing style.

If you want lots of chapter-end problems, you might want to look at Steven
Slade's _Object Oriented Common Lisp_ , though some on this newsgroup have
panned it. It's a fairly large book (as you can see, I prize light weight
and portability in a volume I'm going to be immersed in for weeks on end
:)

The Norvig book is also pretty big, but it walks the reader through the
building of some real (if not state-of-the-art) AI programs, so you get a
feel for actual Lisp coding practice (or so the reviewers maintain - who
am I to argue).

BTW, aren't you  glad you chose to learn Common Lisp and not Scheme,
otherwise I'd have to reccommend SICP, a rather painful reading experience
IMNSHO.

(I actually saw a pretty readable scheme book yesterday by Mark Watson,
published by Springer Verlag, with chess and go example programs, but now
I'm rambling - must be the late hour).

Raf

-- 
Raffael Cavallaro
From: David Bakhash
Subject: Re: books on lisp
Date: 
Message-ID: <cxjhfv8tkte.fsf@engc.bu.edu>
Yeah.  The Graham books are really straight to the point, and also
have cool little programs in them.  When I say "them" I'm also
referring to the 2nd of them: On Lisp: Advanced Topics

good luck,
dave