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Common Lisp Books

125 points by katzeilla 5y ago

eatonphil 5y ago
If you want to keep learning about great Common Lisp books, I recommend following Rainer Joswig or Zach Beane on Twitter. https://twitter.com/xach https://twitter.com/xach https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig
- pedrodelfino 5y ago
  Rainer Joswig also has great answers on Stack Overflow.
Rochus 5y ago
Quite a random selection for such an official looking URL; what about e.g. "Common Lisp - The Language" (https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/1555580416 https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/1555580416) or e.g. "Object-oriented programming in Common LISP" (https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/0201175894 https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/0201175894)? However, the reference to "Principles of Biomedical Informatics" was useful; looks like a very interesting book; another important CL application book not on the list, is of course "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" (https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/1558601910 https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/1558601910).
- lispm 5y ago
  CLtL2 ( https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/cltl2.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/cltl2.html ) is freely available, PAIP ( https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp ) also .
pedrodelfino 5y ago
I really liked "Common LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation", from David S. Touretzky. I think it could have been mentioned. Unlike Practical Common Lisp, it has exercises and extensive sections in each chapter just on tools (such as dribble, trace, describe, step, et cetera). Moreover, I was expecting to see "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming", from Peter Norvig. I have not fully read it, but it seems to be an awesome book. Not just to learn Lisp but a good book in general, since the code is beautifully designed. Despite the title, AI (GOFAI, actually) is just the domain, the lisp techniques and code approach can be applied to other areas. This Reddit's post presents another list that might be an interesting complement to the one we are discussing here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/ddcoar/selection_of_lisp_books/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/ddcoar/selecti...
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  I'd second Gentle Introduction, but only if the reader is willing to actual do all the excersizes in the book. It moves slow and covers less material than other books mentioned, but I found the slow pace and practiced repetion really help the language click for me. What I found really useful was to work through the excersizes in a proper SLIME setup in Emacs with paredit. Since the excersizes were easy enough I could instead focus on learning to use a proper development setup for working with Lisp.
- pronoiac 5y ago
  Norvig's PAIP is available to read online: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp I've helped on the ongoing work of ebook cleanup.
loloquwowndueo 5y ago
This is awesome. I had an introductory lisp course in college and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. To this day it’s the only programming language I’ve tried and been unable to understand (“I could just never grok lisp - it’s incompatible with my brain”). Given a few introductory, free texts, I might be well on my way to remedy that :)
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  It's not a Common Lisp book, but I'd highly recommend The Little Schemer if you're looking to grok lisp.
  - spapas82 5y ago
    The little schemer is great, especially in understanding recursion and tail call optimization (pass an accumulator to track the result as a parameter). However I was never able to understand the chapter that builds the y combinator (and I actually was never able to understand that concept)...
    - mumblemumble 5y ago
      If it helps, I'm rather fond of this explanation: https://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html https://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html Especially this part, from toward the beginning: > Before I get into the details of what Y actually is, I'd like to address the question of why you, as a programmer, should bother to learn about it. To be honest, there aren't a lot of good nuts-and-bolts practical reasons for learning about Y. Even though it does have a few practical applications, for the most part it's mainly of interest to computer language theorists. The article goes on to explain why you should learn it, anyway, but, still, it's not like monads and Haskell. Despite the concept's intellectual cachet, you don't need to understand it to be an effective lisper. That said, this opinion is mine and mine alone, and stands in direct contradiction to the sentiment expressed in the following paragraph.
      - spapas82 5y ago
sudhirkhanger 5y ago
How can I learn enough Lisp to understand Emacs well?
- pedrodelfino 5y ago
  I guess this would be good for you considering your objectives:"An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp". It is available for free here [1]. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/pdf/eintr.pdf https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/pdf/eintr.pdf
- sea6ear 5y ago
  Emacs includes a book, or maybe it's in the list of installable packages called An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp (I think the package is called 'eintr') that does a pretty good job as an introductory lisp programing text and then gets deeper into the internal functions of Emacs. By the later part of it I felt like I had a decent handle on Emacs Lisp and could read the code for packages I was interested in reasonably well.
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    Emacs as of quite a while has included the contents of this book in the Info system under "Emacs Lisp Intro"
- mchaver 5y ago
  This is a great resource (Learning Emacs Lisp by System Crafters) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPQtn7FQEF3D7sroZbXuPZ7 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPQtn7FQEF3...
- nanna 5y ago
  I asked this question myself on hn a couple of months ago, as the Chassell Elisp Introduction just wasn't working for me. Someone suggested learning CL via Seibel's Practical Common Lisp [1] and then just refering to the Elisp docs, which is a bit of a round-the-houses approach, but I'm now half way through the Seibel and really enjoying it. Pitched at just the right level for me. [1] https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ https://gigamonkeys.com/book/
mlang23 5y ago
Graham's "On Lisp" was the only CL book I read from start to finish. Thanks Paul, it was one of the eye-openers I still think about from time to time.
ajarmst 5y ago
Looks like someone else mentioned PAIP. I’d add “The Art of the Metaobject Protocol” as well.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  More people should really read this book. Its great that functional programing is on the rise, but the shitty object systems of C++ and Java have poisoned OOP in most people's mind. CLOS is an awesome object system and TAOTMP really highlights what you can do with a good object system. Functional programing is still awesome, but for high-level work I think the multiparadigm languages like Scala, Swift, and CL are the way to go.
nanna 5y ago
Whats the best stack for building a website or webapp in CL these days? Is it worth it?
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  Hunchentoot as your server, there really is nothing like a unified framework.
- Jach 5y ago
  Hunchentoot is the most popular as a server (and I suspect most people wrap their deployment with either nginx or apache) though two frameworks listed on https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#web-frameworks https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#web-frameworks worth checking out depending on your preferences are Radiance and Lucerne. Link also has other related web stuff; like many things it's hard to say something is the "best" in its class, there are just options and some are more popular. On the front-end there are a few projects floating around that look to be aimed at replicating some of the concepts and workflows from the ClojureScript world for SPAs but I don't think any of them are really ready. I'm not sure it's worth it unless you just want to write CL almost exclusively. It's cool though to have more variation on different deployment (or even "do it in production") workflows available to fit your tastes, from something like PHP's/CGI's copy/edit files loaded each request, to a more conservative shutdown-deploy-restart cycle, to connecting via SSH and then inspecting/debugging/editing the live program through a forwarded REPL socket in your favorite editor just as if you were doing it locally.
- vindarel 5y ago
  I'd say it's worth it to the mid or long term, so you'd benefit from CL's strengths and advantages. It's more difficult than mainstream languages to start a web app only because there are less material, project templates or full blown frameworks to get started, so you better know the web already. In addition to the awesome-cl list of libraries, I recommend to check out the Cookbook https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/web.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/web.html to grok the different parts of a lisp (web) app. And, shameless plugs: a web project skeleton: https://github.com/vindarel/cl-cookieweb https://github.com/vindarel/cl-cookieweb (very new), a demo of hot reloading a running web app (locally or deployed): https://github.com/vindarel/lisp-web-live-reload-example https://github.com/vindarel/lisp-web-live-reload-example
sre79chn 5y ago
www.t3x.org
- tosh 5y ago
  +1 I just recently read the book for Klong by Nils https://t3x.org/klong/book.html https://t3x.org/klong/book.html Worth it!
lispm 5y ago
Another overview of some Lisp books: https://imgur.com/a/5mWJmpo https://imgur.com/a/5mWJmpo
jnxx 5y ago
I think Peter Seibels and Edmung Weitz' books are both fantastic books with a comprehensive and modern view. Can't recommend them enough.
marrou 5y ago
Why do I need to know lisp in 2021? Any practical real use besides being used as example in books about computation?
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  Speaking purely for myself, I like lisp because I find it embodies a certain pure joy of hacking that I don't find to be quite as present in other more popular languages that I use.
- oumua_don17 5y ago
  If you are using a language that supports live editing for example and thus reveals the archaic nature of edit compile test cycle of unproductive programming; you probably need not learn Lisp. This is just one property and there are many more but one which is immediately evident.
phoe-krk 5y ago
This list is not very fresh or exhaustive; for instance, does not contain two recent Apress books, which are Vsevolod Domkin's Programming Algorithms in Lisp and Michał "phoe" Herda's The Common Lisp Condition System. (Disclosure: I was the technical reviewer for the former and I wrote the latter.)
Cybotron5000 5y ago
On the off-chance that someone reading this is also interested in algorithmic composition: https://michael-edwards.org/sc/index.html https://michael-edwards.org/sc/index.html https://michael-edwards.org/sc/liner.html https://michael-edwards.org/sc/liner.html “slippery chicken is an open-source Common Lisp environment for declarative or generative algorithmic composition building on CLM, CMN, CM, MusicXML and Lilypond for score, sound file, and/or MIDI file outputs and the integration of these into closely aligned hybrid acoustic-electronic pieces of music.” …made by (the extremely awesome) Michael Edwards: https://michael-edwards.org/ https://michael-edwards.org/
mark_l_watson 5y ago
Good list. I think that I own all published Common Lisp books, and most Prolog and Smalltalk books. I prefer reading books to excess time browsing the web and social media. Including non-technical books, I would be embarrassed to admit how much time I spend reading every week. A self plug: you can get free PDF/ePub/Kindle versions of my Common Lisp book on my personal web site (https://markwatson.com https://markwatson.com)

125 points by katzeilla 5y ago

If you want to keep learning about great Common Lisp books, I recommend following Rainer Joswig or Zach Beane on Twitter. https://twitter.com/xach https://twitter.com/xach https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig

pedrodelfino 5y ago
Rainer Joswig also has great answers on Stack Overflow.

Rochus 5y ago

Quite a random selection for such an official looking URL; what about e.g. "Common Lisp - The Language" (https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/1555580416 https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/1555580416) or e.g. "Object-oriented programming in Common LISP" (https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/0201175894 https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/0201175894)? However, the reference to "Principles of Biomedical Informatics" was useful; looks like a very interesting book; another important CL application book not on the list, is of course "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" (https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/1558601910 https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/1558601910).

lispm 5y ago
CLtL2 ( https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/cltl2.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/cltl2.html ) is freely available, PAIP ( https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp ) also .

pedrodelfino 5y ago

I really liked "Common LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation", from David S. Touretzky. I think it could have been mentioned. Unlike Practical Common Lisp, it has exercises and extensive sections in each chapter just on tools (such as dribble, trace, describe, step, et cetera). Moreover, I was expecting to see "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming", from Peter Norvig. I have not fully read it, but it seems to be an awesome book. Not just to learn Lisp but a good book in general, since the code is beautifully designed. Despite the title, AI (GOFAI, actually) is just the domain, the lisp techniques and code approach can be applied to other areas. This Reddit's post presents another list that might be an interesting complement to the one we are discussing here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/ddcoar/selection_of_lisp_books/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/ddcoar/selecti...

blacktriangle 5y ago
I'd second Gentle Introduction, but only if the reader is willing to actual do all the excersizes in the book. It moves slow and covers less material than other books mentioned, but I found the slow pace and practiced repetion really help the language click for me. What I found really useful was to work through the excersizes in a proper SLIME setup in Emacs with paredit. Since the excersizes were easy enough I could instead focus on learning to use a proper development setup for working with Lisp.
pronoiac 5y ago
Norvig's PAIP is available to read online: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp I've helped on the ongoing work of ebook cleanup.

loloquwowndueo 5y ago

This is awesome. I had an introductory lisp course in college and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. To this day it’s the only programming language I’ve tried and been unable to understand (“I could just never grok lisp - it’s incompatible with my brain”). Given a few introductory, free texts, I might be well on my way to remedy that :)

mumblemumble 5y ago
It's not a Common Lisp book, but I'd highly recommend The Little Schemer if you're looking to grok lisp.
- spapas82 5y ago
  The little schemer is great, especially in understanding recursion and tail call optimization (pass an accumulator to track the result as a parameter). However I was never able to understand the chapter that builds the y combinator (and I actually was never able to understand that concept)...
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    If it helps, I'm rather fond of this explanation: https://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html https://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html Especially this part, from toward the beginning: > Before I get into the details of what Y actually is, I'd like to address the question of why you, as a programmer, should bother to learn about it. To be honest, there aren't a lot of good nuts-and-bolts practical reasons for learning about Y. Even though it does have a few practical applications, for the most part it's mainly of interest to computer language theorists. The article goes on to explain why you should learn it, anyway, but, still, it's not like monads and Haskell. Despite the concept's intellectual cachet, you don't need to understand it to be an effective lisper. That said, this opinion is mine and mine alone, and stands in direct contradiction to the sentiment expressed in the following paragraph.
    - spapas82 5y ago

sudhirkhanger 5y ago

How can I learn enough Lisp to understand Emacs well?

pedrodelfino 5y ago
I guess this would be good for you considering your objectives:"An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp". It is available for free here [1]. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/pdf/eintr.pdf https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/pdf/eintr.pdf
sea6ear 5y ago
Emacs includes a book, or maybe it's in the list of installable packages called An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp (I think the package is called 'eintr') that does a pretty good job as an introductory lisp programing text and then gets deeper into the internal functions of Emacs. By the later part of it I felt like I had a decent handle on Emacs Lisp and could read the code for packages I was interested in reasonably well.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  Emacs as of quite a while has included the contents of this book in the Info system under "Emacs Lisp Intro"
mchaver 5y ago
This is a great resource (Learning Emacs Lisp by System Crafters) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPQtn7FQEF3D7sroZbXuPZ7 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPQtn7FQEF3...
nanna 5y ago
I asked this question myself on hn a couple of months ago, as the Chassell Elisp Introduction just wasn't working for me. Someone suggested learning CL via Seibel's Practical Common Lisp [1] and then just refering to the Elisp docs, which is a bit of a round-the-houses approach, but I'm now half way through the Seibel and really enjoying it. Pitched at just the right level for me. [1] https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ https://gigamonkeys.com/book/

mlang23 5y ago

Graham's "On Lisp" was the only CL book I read from start to finish. Thanks Paul, it was one of the eye-openers I still think about from time to time.

ajarmst 5y ago

Looks like someone else mentioned PAIP. I’d add “The Art of the Metaobject Protocol” as well.

blacktriangle 5y ago
More people should really read this book. Its great that functional programing is on the rise, but the shitty object systems of C++ and Java have poisoned OOP in most people's mind. CLOS is an awesome object system and TAOTMP really highlights what you can do with a good object system. Functional programing is still awesome, but for high-level work I think the multiparadigm languages like Scala, Swift, and CL are the way to go.

nanna 5y ago

Whats the best stack for building a website or webapp in CL these days? Is it worth it?

blacktriangle 5y ago
Hunchentoot as your server, there really is nothing like a unified framework.
Jach 5y ago
Hunchentoot is the most popular as a server (and I suspect most people wrap their deployment with either nginx or apache) though two frameworks listed on https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#web-frameworks https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#web-frameworks worth checking out depending on your preferences are Radiance and Lucerne. Link also has other related web stuff; like many things it's hard to say something is the "best" in its class, there are just options and some are more popular. On the front-end there are a few projects floating around that look to be aimed at replicating some of the concepts and workflows from the ClojureScript world for SPAs but I don't think any of them are really ready. I'm not sure it's worth it unless you just want to write CL almost exclusively. It's cool though to have more variation on different deployment (or even "do it in production") workflows available to fit your tastes, from something like PHP's/CGI's copy/edit files loaded each request, to a more conservative shutdown-deploy-restart cycle, to connecting via SSH and then inspecting/debugging/editing the live program through a forwarded REPL socket in your favorite editor just as if you were doing it locally.
vindarel 5y ago
I'd say it's worth it to the mid or long term, so you'd benefit from CL's strengths and advantages. It's more difficult than mainstream languages to start a web app only because there are less material, project templates or full blown frameworks to get started, so you better know the web already. In addition to the awesome-cl list of libraries, I recommend to check out the Cookbook https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/web.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/web.html to grok the different parts of a lisp (web) app. And, shameless plugs: a web project skeleton: https://github.com/vindarel/cl-cookieweb https://github.com/vindarel/cl-cookieweb (very new), a demo of hot reloading a running web app (locally or deployed): https://github.com/vindarel/lisp-web-live-reload-example https://github.com/vindarel/lisp-web-live-reload-example

sre79chn 5y ago

www.t3x.org

tosh 5y ago
+1 I just recently read the book for Klong by Nils https://t3x.org/klong/book.html https://t3x.org/klong/book.html Worth it!

lispm 5y ago

Another overview of some Lisp books: https://imgur.com/a/5mWJmpo https://imgur.com/a/5mWJmpo

jnxx 5y ago

I think Peter Seibels and Edmung Weitz' books are both fantastic books with a comprehensive and modern view. Can't recommend them enough.

marrou 5y ago

Why do I need to know lisp in 2021? Any practical real use besides being used as example in books about computation?

mumblemumble 5y ago
Speaking purely for myself, I like lisp because I find it embodies a certain pure joy of hacking that I don't find to be quite as present in other more popular languages that I use.
oumua_don17 5y ago
If you are using a language that supports live editing for example and thus reveals the archaic nature of edit compile test cycle of unproductive programming; you probably need not learn Lisp. This is just one property and there are many more but one which is immediately evident.

phoe-krk 5y ago

This list is not very fresh or exhaustive; for instance, does not contain two recent Apress books, which are Vsevolod Domkin's Programming Algorithms in Lisp and Michał "phoe" Herda's The Common Lisp Condition System. (Disclosure: I was the technical reviewer for the former and I wrote the latter.)

Cybotron5000 5y ago

On the off-chance that someone reading this is also interested in algorithmic composition: https://michael-edwards.org/sc/index.html https://michael-edwards.org/sc/index.html https://michael-edwards.org/sc/liner.html https://michael-edwards.org/sc/liner.html “slippery chicken is an open-source Common Lisp environment for declarative or generative algorithmic composition building on CLM, CMN, CM, MusicXML and Lilypond for score, sound file, and/or MIDI file outputs and the integration of these into closely aligned hybrid acoustic-electronic pieces of music.” …made by (the extremely awesome) Michael Edwards: https://michael-edwards.org/ https://michael-edwards.org/

mark_l_watson 5y ago

Good list. I think that I own all published Common Lisp books, and most Prolog and Smalltalk books. I prefer reading books to excess time browsing the web and social media. Including non-technical books, I would be embarrassed to admit how much time I spend reading every week. A self plug: you can get free PDF/ePub/Kindle versions of my Common Lisp book on my personal web site (https://markwatson.com https://markwatson.com)