Reviews for The Elements of Artificial Intelligence: Using Common LISP

1. Poor code examples, but a good overview

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, December 12th, 2003

   I did not finish reading this book. I already had read Peter Norvigs book and although his book is older, it is better in almost every way.

   The code examples are poor and the style lousy! When I try to understand the complex explanations (of the complex subjects) they're often confusing and tangled with half explanations of concepts I can hardly recognize even though I've studied them before in other books. When this happens I turn to the code to get the concrete facts straight, but unfortunately they're so poor that even if they had been written in C, they wouldn't be very exemplary. The programming style is imperative only and very C-like.

   The book nevertheless covers such interesting subjects like visualization, robotics and visual scanning using neural networks & cetera. As the title says only elements of the subjects are covered. It feels uncomplete even then because of the feeling of missing something when one wants to get more concrete and try some of the things out.

   I cannot recommend this book unless you need an overview of artificial intelligence. That is all you'll get with this one. I don't find it suitable as a handbook because of the poor code.