LispForum

What's up everyone!

Just doing a little introduction of myself since I think I'm going to be sticking around for a while. My name is Eric and I'm in college (going into my senior year). At college I am studying Computer Science with a concentration in Advanced Computing. I guess you can say I'm an okay programmer. Mostly in school we learn Java with a little bit of PHP, C/C++ and even less in languages such as Lisp. Soooo... this summer I am setting out on an adventure into the Land Of Lisp (yes, I am aware that is a name of a book). I want to spend a lot of my free time learning Common Lisp and trying to get a better overall understanding of how it works and functional programming as a whole (with side effects).

Summer Plans:

I've picked out 3 or 4 books that I'd like to get through. I believe these will give me a thorough introduction and maybe send me towards a rank of "intermediate" when it comes to CL. These are the book I've got planned:

1. Land Of Lisp (about 300 pages deep into this one already) (Barski)
2. Practical Common Lisp (Seibel)
3. ANSI Common Lisp (Graham)
4. Object-Oriented Programming in Common Lisp: A Progammer's Guide to CLOS (Keene)
and If I have time I would like to get started with On Lisp (Graham)


I've got a lot of reading and coding planned for this summer, so expect to see me around. Let me know what you're all up to, maybe we can do something collaborative!

Welcome to Lisp and LispForum! Glad to see new people learning CL. You book choices look fine, just know that while Graham is really good, his style is a little idiosyncratic (comparative notes here).

Thanks! I've heard that from a lot of different places. I'll keep an eye out for it

That's a good reading list. If you can get through all that and soak it all up, you'll be doing quite well.

Well I just finished Land of Lisp. I'll give it 4 out of 5 stars:


First of all, for a beginner that wants to learn about Common Lisp (Such as what I was when I got this book), this will definitely do the job. This book is definitely geared towards beginners that want to learn the language. With that being said, there are a few things that this book could have done better, in my opinion. No beginner should approach any book and decide "When I finish this book I am going to be an expert", it just does not work that way. So, my complaint? Well, this book does cover the basics and some more advanced techniques, but it also moves quite quickly. The author provides you with key principles that you will be able to understand and use in your own programs, but a lot of the games we write in the book are quite complicated. He takes the basics concepts and definitely takes them to the next level. This really isn't a bad thing, for someone who has been around the language for a while, but for a beginner, it would have been nice to see some examples that just use the key concepts. I definitely learned a lot from this book, but I am going to have to read more books on Common Lisp before I am totally able to see myself writing code that matches some of the examples in this book. Overall, the book is great. Just wish there was a few more basic examples to help get my mind in the right place.