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While I have not yet finished Dr Conrad Barski's "Land of Lisp", I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in an introductory book as I am really enjoyin

While I have not yet finished Dr Conrad Barski's "Land of Lisp", I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in an introductory book as I am really enjoying it.

silentbicycle 16y ago
Yes, and don't forget to actually play with the code. Reading it with a REPL handy will teach you more than just reading ever could. Experiment!
GeneralMaximus 16y ago
Land of Lisp is probably the best computer book I've read in the 5 or 6 years I've been programming. It manages to be informative and fun at the same time. Where most books teach you how to write boring crap like JSON parsers, LoL walks you through Hunt the Wumpus and teaches you a couple of useful graph algorithms along the way. It devotes a chapter to web applications where you write a web interface using a web server you wrote yourself for a game you wrote yourself. There's even a program that uses a very rudimentary evolutionary algorithm to evolve organisms in a virtual world. Thanks to LoL, I dug up archives of computer magazines from the seventies and eighties[1] (Creative Computing, Compute! etc.) The "hacker spirit" sure has changed in the last 30 years. Those magazines were playful. They even had entire sections devoted to computer games and interesting puzzles you could solve using a computer (Core War, for example, first appeared in one such magazine). These days people write Twitter clients and todo lists that run on Google App Engine. LoL is one of very few books published in the last decade that capture the hacker spirit. It ranks right up there with _why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby and Programming Perl[2]. Right now I'm having a blast re-writing old BASIC games in Lisp and then writing programs to beat those games. Most games are easy to beat, but some of them can pose quite a challenge. Fun times :D --- [1] http://www.atariarchives.org/ http://www.atariarchives.org/ and http://www.atarimagazines.com/ http://www.atarimagazines.com/ [2] I don't actually program Perl. I just read a few chapters from Programming Perl one lazy afternoon.

While I have not yet finished Dr Conrad Barski's "Land of Lisp", I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in an introductory book as I am really enjoying it.

silentbicycle 16y ago

Yes, and don't forget to actually play with the code. Reading it with a REPL handy will teach you more than just reading ever could. Experiment!

GeneralMaximus 16y ago

Land of Lisp is probably the best computer book I've read in the 5 or 6 years I've been programming. It manages to be informative and fun at the same time. Where most books teach you how to write boring crap like JSON parsers, LoL walks you through Hunt the Wumpus and teaches you a couple of useful graph algorithms along the way. It devotes a chapter to web applications where you write a web interface using a web server you wrote yourself for a game you wrote yourself. There's even a program that uses a very rudimentary evolutionary algorithm to evolve organisms in a virtual world. Thanks to LoL, I dug up archives of computer magazines from the seventies and eighties[1] (Creative Computing, Compute! etc.) The "hacker spirit" sure has changed in the last 30 years. Those magazines were playful. They even had entire sections devoted to computer games and interesting puzzles you could solve using a computer (Core War, for example, first appeared in one such magazine). These days people write Twitter clients and todo lists that run on Google App Engine. LoL is one of very few books published in the last decade that capture the hacker spirit. It ranks right up there with _why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby and Programming Perl[2]. Right now I'm having a blast re-writing old BASIC games in Lisp and then writing programs to beat those games. Most games are easy to beat, but some of them can pose quite a challenge. Fun times :D --- [1] http://www.atariarchives.org/ http://www.atariarchives.org/ and http://www.atarimagazines.com/ http://www.atarimagazines.com/ [2] I don't actually program Perl. I just read a few chapters from Programming Perl one lazy afternoon.