Walt and I happened into a Borders this weekend, where I found a copy of Paul Graham's On Lisp (out of print and deeply discounted, but more than £10). What's so evil about it? I've spent more time than I care admit reading it. Especially when I had planned time this week to finish up some last minute issues before YAPC (including, among other things, final touch ups on my presentations and lightning talks).
Oh, and it's a good book to boot. The first few chapters are an excellent defense for bottom-up programming (the stuff that doesn't work in FORTRAN, and can shoot you in the foot in C). The entire book is a tutorial on advanced techniques in Common Lisp, focusing heavily on Macros (the heavily undocumented portion of CLisp).
On Lisp makes it clear to me that The Damian has another book to write - Programming Perl Grammars. :-) (Once he's finished the next two or five Perl books he already knows about, of course.)
The book is apparently downloadable from Graham's website. At last, I can learn the power of macros and see what all the hoopla's about! (Lisp macros have been on my "respected programmers say good things about this, so there's probably something there" radar for almost a year, now.)
Interestingly, Graham comments that someone from the publishing company actually gave him back his copyright. Wow. Three cheers for that kind of policy!
Re:Downloadable!
ziggy on 2002-06-19T18:08:40
Yes, it is. And it comes complete that all of the issues that PDF brings to the table. First and foremost, it's difficult to read a PDF on the sofa, or take it with you on the train. (Sure, I could bring my laptop, or print the whole darn thing out, but that's still not as user friendly as a nice paperback copy).The book is apparently downloadable from Graham's website.I started reading bits and pieces of the PDF, but couldn't get into it. That's just me though. Plus, I'm finding this book very quotable, and a paperback copy is much easier to annotate with post-it tabs than a PDF.
:-) If you're interested, CLTL2 is available in PS and DVI. The part I most wanted to read was the appendicies, and printing those out was certainly more effective than buying the 1000 page reference.
That looks like an acceptance that this title peaked when it sold 20 copies. In 1994, Java was getting hot, and Lisp[+AI] was at the depths of a lull from which it still hasn't recovered.Interestingly, Graham comments that someone from the publishing company actually gave him back his copyright. Wow. Three cheers for that kind of policy!I hope Paul republishes this. It'll probably be a reference for Arc if that time comes.
Re:Downloadable!
jdavidb on 2002-06-19T18:29:22
For sure, I'd definitely rather have the printed book. I'm not saying, "Hey ziggy, why'd you buy it when you could've downloaded it." I'm saying, "Hey everybody, this really neat out of print book ziggy's talking about can be downloaded." I'll probably put it on my laptop and look through it while flying to YAPC.
Re:Downloadable!
ajtaylor on 2002-06-19T18:31:39
And it comes complete that all of the issues that PDF brings to the table.Tooting my horn, shortly after I saw it mentioned on
./ I grabbed the PS file & ran it through Acrobat Distiller so Paul could have said PDF. So blame me if the conversion didn't go well. :-) Re:Downloadable!
ziggy on 2002-06-19T18:47:02
The issues aren't with the conversion, but with the PDF format itself. It's great for some things (tax forms, slideshows, product brochures, reference documentation), but it gets cumbersome when you're reading page after page of a lengthy file. Especially with books.Re:Downloadable!
ajtaylor on 2002-06-20T13:56:12
I know exactly what you mean. I have no laptop so I can't learn about Lisp on the throne.:-)
It's evil in the way Perl is evil, but more so. I keep trying to find PG's ANSI common LISP, but it doesn't seem to be published in the UK.
