Books

Picked up a very talented Lisp kid's book list from here through this:

I became interested in Lisp-like languages mostly from hearing Python programmers look for x in the language, “because Lisp has it”. So about two years ago, I armed myself with ANSI Common Lisp, and dived in. Since then, PAIP, The Little Schemer, The Seasoned Schemer, Lisp in Small Pieces, SICP, On Lisp (dead-tree version!), EOPL, CLtL, etc. And I haven't looked back; it's over a year since I coded a program more than 100 lines in something other than CL/Scheme. As has been put in more eloquent ways on the RtL highlight reel, all other languages just look fundamentally wrong and unwieldy by comparison. More importantly, from c.l.l and p.l.o traffic, it seems that we're growing in number!

On Lisp is freely available online.

Norvig also wrote A Retrospective on Paradigms of AI programming (PAIP). For me PAIP has changed the way I think about programming more than any other book.

Norvig also praises some of the mentioned books: The best, in my opinion, are Paul Graham's On Lisp and ANSI Common Lisp. Probably the best book ever on how to write Lisp compilers and interpreters is Christian Queinnec's Lisp in Small Pieces. In the Scheme world, Abelson and Sussman have a new edition of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and Daniel Friedman has a new version of The Little Lisper called The Seasoned Schemer. Stephen Slade has a new book which I have not had a chance to read yet.

On Practical Common Lisp (freely available online), he writes :"This book shows the power of Lisp not only in the areas that it has traditionally been noted for—such as developing a complete unit test framework in only 26 lines of code—but also in new areas such as parsing binary MP3 files, building a web application for browsing a collection of songs, and streaming audio over the web. Many readers will be surprised that Lisp allows you to do all this with conciseness similar to scripting languages such as Python, efficiency similar to C++, and unparalleled flexibility in designing your own language extensions.” —Peter Norvig, Director of Search Quality, Google Inc


With that said: Happy reading and learning.