ANSI Common LISP (Prentice Hall Series in Artificial Intelligence) | 
 enlarge | Author: Paul Graham
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Category: Book
List Price: $75.00
Buy Used: $40.00
You Save: $35.00 (47%)
New (24) Used (14) from $40.00
Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 243125
Media: Paperback
Pages: 432
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0133708756
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.133
EAN: 9780133708752
ASIN: 0133708756
Publication Date: November 12, 1995
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: name on inside front cover crossed out with black ink, very worn edges.
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| Editorial Reviews:
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.
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...
 The must have book for Lisp programmers September 8, 2008
Stormcoder (Seattle, Wa United States)
If you are interested in Lisp, you must get this book right after finishing Practical Common Lisp.
thought provoking November 1, 2007
Dion Dock (Portland, OR USA)
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 October 13, 2007
Kailden (USA)
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.
When I Hack Lisp this book is with me April 15, 2006
Thomas DeBenning (Saratoga, CA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Once you move beyond the very basics of Lisp this is a great book to have around. It has nice to the point examples of how to perform common and uncommon tasks in Lisp. In the back of the book there is a small description of the commonly used functions for Lisp. The brievity and size of the book plus the density of the material presented makes for a excellent book to have at your side while you are coding. I wouldn't recommend it for developers or anyone who has never seen Lisp code before but once you are beyond that stage it is an excellent bargin
a very expressive language March 12, 2006
W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3)
3 out of 11 found this review helpful
Common Lisp is a bit of a throwback. And so is this book, from 95. There is absolutely no graphics described for Common Lisp here. Not unlike Fortran, C or C++. Here you get a "pure" language, without all that user interface fluff. The lack of an update to this book in 10 years also reflects the stability of Common Lisp. Veterans of C or Fortran should recognise this.
The language itself will be radically different to many readers, if they hail from a typical C, C++ or Java background. Very flexible and powerful. Plus, the code can be nicely compact. In some qualitative sense, you might say that Lisp has more expressive power than many other languages, per some unit length of source code.
The numerous problems should be appreciated by the diligent reader. And they should be tackled.
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