Practical Common Lisp Reviews and details

Social recommendations and mentions

• I Chose Common Lisp

  I began learning Common Lisp (CL) from the Common Lisp HyperSpec (CLHS): https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/Contents.htm When I began learning CL about two decades ago, I did not know of any other source, so CLHS was my only source back then and I think it has served me well. A popular recommendation these days is Practical Common Lisp (by Peter Seibel): https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

• Holding a Program in One's Head (2007)

  A quote originally (AFAIK) from the wonderful (and free!) book 'Practical Common Lisp'. https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago

• Defense of Lisp Macros

  The Giga Monkeys Book, Practical Common Lisp is also excellent: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago

• The Loudest Lisp Program

  > So it's really pick your poison; either the child controls the call, at the risk of doing it wrong or not at all, or it doesn't but then certain things become impossible. CL lets you do both in various ways: the typical way to define a constructor is an :AFTER method that just sets the slots (fields in other languages) of the object and having a lot of behavior in constructors is unusual. You can also define an... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• The Loudest Lisp Program

  There are a bunch of things to learn from Lisp: * list processing -> model data as lists and process those * list processing applied to Lisp -> model programs as lists and process those -> EVAL and COMPILE * EVAL, the interpreter as a Lisp program * write programs to process programs -> code generators, macros, ... * write programs in a more declarative way -> a code generator transforms the description into... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• Racket Language

  In respect to Common Lisp, you could look into "Common Lisp Recipes" by Weitz[2], and "Practical Common Lisp" by Seibel[1]. These are industrial-strength systems which were used to built large airline reservation systems. Scheme is in a way more minimalist and Schemes are not as large, but this might also be give an erroneous impression because they build on the enormous experience with Common Lisp and have boiled... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• Steel – An embedded scheme interpreter in Rust

  Not exactly what you asked for but, if you have time, I would recommend looking at Practical Common Lisp: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ And also this blog post (which is a much smaller time commitment): https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2020-12-18-repl-driven/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• Common Lisp: An Interactive Approach (1992) [pdf]

  If someone is considering learning CL effectively, take this piece of advice: use Emacs. You might think that it's an outdated piece of shit, maybe you hate RMS with a passion or whatever. But make yourself a favour and use it at least for the month that will take you to go through a manual like this or Practical Common Lisp or several others. Just install SBCL, QuickLisp, Emacs and SLIME (or Sly, that is a more... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• Code Is Not Literature

  And Practical Common Lisp, another popular one on HN. The domain name took me by surprised and I struggled to remember why it seemed so familiar; it turns out that PCL can be found in its entirety here, and I had used it years ago to learn CL: https://gigamonkeys.com/book. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• Video: Practical Common Lisp. Peter Seibel Google Talk

  The book is great too. You can read it online at https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ Even if you will never use Commin Lisp in production it will teach you new tricks and nee ways to thing about software development. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

• Adventures in the Land of Lisp

  I'd say use SBCL (which is a Common Lisp implementation) is the canoncial choice for beginners. And then read through Practical Common Lisp to get a nice tour of many of CL's features (including the REPL, macros, conditions, object system+multiple dispatch...) while building an actual non-trivial application from the ground up. It definitely blew my mind. Source: almost 2 years ago

• Why Lisp Syntax Works

  > Is there a recommended "intro to understanding lisp" resource out there for someone like myself to dive in to? Practical Common Lisp - https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ Casting SPELs in Lisp - http://www.lisperati.com/casting.html. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

• yet another super noob question please forgive me

  Clojure is my main language, so my resource is limited, but I particularly enjoyed working through Practical Common Lisp: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. Source: almost 2 years ago

• A few newbie questions about lisp

  Q4: Read https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. Each chapter should take less than an hour, and it's filled with "useful" things to do, if you don't mind pretending to be in 2005 for a while (I don't think there's a technical book whose example projects have aged precisely as poorly as Practical Common Lisp anywhere after 1980, but they are real world tasks). Source: almost 2 years ago

• How to Understand and Use Common Lisp

  Also Practical Common Lisp: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

• I want to learn how to create structures and/or closures for emacs-lisp configuration

  The general attitude and style are unfortunately incredibly arrogant and dogmatic. However, chapter 2, closures, should be the best introduction into closures in Lisp I have seen. Generally "On Lisp" is recommended to read before you go over to "Let over Lambda". There are other books that might be more advisable before you jump into "Let over Lambda", for example Pieter Siebels Practical Common Lisp or Norvigs... Source: almost 2 years ago

• Beginners help: difference between "let" "setq" and "defvar"

  As a lisp beginner I found Practical Common Lisp a good source (there is a free version on line). I also found the racket language a beginner friendly way to start with a lisp language. Source: about 2 years ago

• Good short documentation for CL functions (etc.) available?

  For more beginner-friendly, I suggest P. Siebels Practical Common Lisp or The CL Cookbook. Both of those should be available in Emacs info format! If authors are lurking in here :-). Source: about 2 years ago

• Tour of Functional Programming?

  I think Common Lisp is a good option. There's other versions of lisp out there (I personally like Racket a lot, Scheme is also popular), but my first exposure to Lisp was through the book Practical Common Lisp (free online) and it blew my mind. It was a lot of fun working through the examples and getting kind of an unadulterated classic lisp experience. I learned Racket later and I like it better as a language,... Source: over 2 years ago

• Gentoo and Emacs, a match made in heaven!

  I remember casually reading this book on common lisp: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. Source: over 2 years ago

• A Few Examples of Lisp Code Typography

  For Common Lisp, there are several free books available: - Practical Common Lisp (aimed at people who know how to program in a more mainstream language already) [1] - Paradigms in Artificial Intelligence Programming (my personal favorite) [2] - Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation (aimed at absolute beginners of programming) [3] I highly recommend the r/lisp reddit community. Reddit as a... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago