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I’ve been meaning to read Practical Common Lisp for some time. Would you recommend this even for complete beginners to Lisp?
by cepher 4y ago
I’ve been meaning to read Practical Common Lisp for some time. Would you recommend this even for complete beginners to Lisp?
- f1shy 4y agoThat is THE book I would recommend for beginners.
- User23 4y agoIt’s a fine first book. I’d certainly recommend it. I don’t recall if it has instructions on getting a dev env up and running, but if it does I imagine they’re out of date. Emacs with Sly or SLIME is what I’ve used, but I believe there are viable options for proper interactive development in vim and vs code among others. If you just use a basic editor and paste code into a repl in a terminal you won’t be getting the experience most Lispers do.
- georgeoliver 4y agoYes I would! I think it was the first complete book I read while learning CL.
- abudabi123 4y agoI recommend the gentle introduction to Lisp book for the complete beginner. The chapter on files in the Practical Common Lisp book wasn't complete enough for me to read a one line file of 800MB which is part of the Harvard Library Open Metadata archived set.
- parenthesis 4y agoI'm assuming you mean Touretzky's Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation — http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/index.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/index.html — which, yes, is a wonderful book for a complete beginner.
- dan-robertson 4y agoI read it around 10 years ago without knowing any lisp and got on ok.
- G3rn0ti 4y agoTwo prehensile toes up! ;)
- scottomyers 4y agoPractical Common Lisp is a fantastic read, but Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation gets my vote as the best book for Common Lisp beginners. Working through it was a joy.