[Bese-devel] Learning Lisp

[Waldo Rubinstein]

On Sep 21, 2005, at 11:55 AM, Drew Crampsie wrote:

> Waldo Rubinstein wrote:
>
>> Hello list,
>> I apologize for being a bit off topic from the mailing list   
>> objective's, but I hope your answers won't take too much of your  
>> time.
>> As some of you know, I'm trying to catch up to Lisp and UCW at  
>> warp  speed and I'm wondering if you can recommend a good book for  
>> learning  Lisp and another good reference book that I can go back  
>> and forth to  get simple answers from?
>>
>
> IMO the best book for learning Lisp, assuming you are already an  
> experienced programmer, is "Practical Common Lisp" which you can  
> read online here : http://gigamonkeys.com/book/ (although it's much  
> nicer in hardcover).

I have been reading the online version and I liked it very much. So  
much that I decided to purchase the hardcover. However, I decided to  
post the question before investing the moneys in that book or maybe a  
different one. So far, it seems that I'm going to buy the hardcover  
of this one.

>
> As for a reference, i've heard good things about Grahams "Ansi  
> Common Lisp", although IMO the best reference is the hyperspec  
> (http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index.htm).

While at Amazon looking for "Practical Common Lisp", I read good  
reviews about Grahams' book, so I was kind of waiting to hear some  
feedback from you guys before making my decision. I have visited  
HyperSpec, but it seems you need to have some degree of CL knowledge  
before you can understand what it's all saying. This looks more like  
language standard specs in grammar form which could be, as you  
suggest, used as reference. I learned to use it by watching Marco's  
SLIME video :)

>
> It also might help to pick up a little scheme, at least the concept  
> call/cc, as UCW does differ from Common Lisp in that regard :).

Wow. Now you threw me off completely. No wonder I couldn't always  
follow the UCW code I was looking :). I thought UCW was written in  
CL? How could it differ? I guess you could always write your own  
language within Lisp and you could always make it look more like  
Scheme (at least in concepts) than CL code. How essential is it to  
have some Scheme knowledge? I learned Lisp back in college (14 years  
ago) and never touched it again. I guess I could pick it up again  
rather quickly. Now, should I just read high level concepts of Scheme  
in order to understand UCW's concepts or is it more like learning to  
program in Scheme that will help me more?

Thanks for the feedback and look forward to hearing back.

- Waldo