cartercc  <cartercc@gmail.com> wrote:
+---------------
| On Oct 16, 6:15�pm, carlo.ambro...@gmail.com wrote:
| > Now i'm reading capter 3 of "pratical common lisp": i really hope
| > chapter 2 is only a "whirlwind tour" as the author calls it, because
| > if things are going to get even more complicated it's not my kind of
| > book!!!!!!!!!
| 
| I'm not sure that PCL is the best place to start.
...
| I like PCL, but I think that you miss a lot by seeing only one view of
| the language. I would encourage you to get several books and compare
| their views of the language. Lisp is sufficiently malleable to allow
| you to blend whatever approach you find most to your liking.
+---------------

I already knew Scheme at the time, so I'm sure that biases things a
bit, but I found Peter Norvig's "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence
Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp" <http://www.norvig.com/paip.html>
to be a *great* intro to CL, much more so than as in intro to AI per se.
*Quite* worth the $80-90 price, IMHO.

Norvig wrote a retrospective <http://norvig.com/Lisp-retro.html>
in October 1997 (six years after the book was published), updated
again in April 2002, which near the end contains a section titled
"What Lessons are in PAIP?", giving his own personal "list of the
52 most important lessons in PAIP" [each is indexed to the page(s)
in the book where that particular lesson comes up].

It definitely gives one a different (not necessarily "better"
or "worse" -- just different) view of the language than "PCL"
or "ANSI Common Lisp" [or "On Lisp", for that matter, since
Norvig & Graham have slightly different approaches to the use
of macros].


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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