Reviews for Practical Common Lisp (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

1. Lives up to its title

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2007

   Do not buy this book if you want to learn Lisp. Buy this book if you have gained some exposure to Lisp but doubt that it can be used to solve real world programming problems. I have dabbled with Lisp on and off for 20 years; this book has helped me with some basic issues that I could not grasp, for lack of suitable "real" examples. The approach is "bottom-up", so be prepared to wade through several chapters before you get to the meat, but you will learn many essential skills along the way. Definitely makes me a better Lisp programmer, and a keener advocate for the language.

2. Best intro to Lisp

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, April 12th, 2005

   I started reading this book last year, in it's unfinished on-line state because I'd finally succumbed to Erid Raymond's "suggestion" that learning Lisp will make you a better programmer, even if you never program in it.
   I also bought Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp, downloaded several of the out-of-print free copies of Lisp books, trawled www.cliki.net, read Paul Graham's website, lemonodor.com, Bill Clementson's blog, etc, etc.

   Paul Graham's book is probably one of the more famous and recommended Common Lisp books, and these are the main reasons I bought it. It feels more aimed at the very basics of Lisp, going into reasonable detail about these, and is a fantastic quick-reference book (i.e you should buy it, too!) but it also feels very much of its time (the 80's, I think) and being a reasonably seasoned programmer in other languages, I found myself skipping chunks of it.

   The two books which really helped me get excited about were David Lamkins' "Successful Lisp" (also available to buy and on-line) and "Practical Common Lisp". The two complement each other very well, where Practical CL starts off gently, giving a basics cleanly and comprehensibly, then drops you right in with real examples that I found I could compare with how-you-do-it in other languages. This makes it sound like it's a sink-or-swim style, but definitely isn't the case. Instead, it uses a examples that mix concepts explained in the current chapter, plus those that are coming up later, so you can see early on how multiple facets of the environment go together as a whole, rather than as independant chunks that you have to put togehter yourself.

   My only complaints were early on, where "Scheme" (one of the other major Lisp dialects) was not explained well enough: my first big dilemma was whether to start learning Scheme or Common Lisp (go for CL first, but try to learn both, I've decided) but Paul's now put a quick but decent few paragraphs in the first chapter about Scheme. The other complaint was it hasn't a reference section, which is always very useful when you're starting out in a language, so you can browse, remind yourself quickly, etc. I later discovered the HyperSpec (and "Successful Lisp") but the published version of the book has a whole chapter devoted to getting more information, incl. must-have references like the HyperSpec.

   All in all, I can't fault this book, nor can I recommend it highly enough to novice Lispers.

3. An instant classic

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, April 12th, 2005

   This book is the ideal introduction to using Common Lisp as a powerful general-purpose language. Lisp is often written off as too academic, abstract or difficult to learn or just outdated - I would be astounded if anyone still held those views after even the first few chapters here. It provides a thorough general intro. - all of Lisp's strangeness and charm is on show, which is likely to be quite mind blowing if you're coming from C++/Java etc, but it's main achievement is to make the language truly accessible for modern programmers who care more about powerful, practical solutions than the history or aesthetics of Lisp - along the way you'll learn a lot about those too, but they aren't the main course. Whether or not you intend to use Lisp for your next project, read this book if you want to be a better programmer.