Loving Lisp, or the Savvy Programmer's Secret Weapon

Author(s): Mark Watson
Last update: September 18, 2002
Free license: Creative Commons License

This book was suggested by pr_tiglao

Book excerpts:

Loving Lisp is intended to get you, the reader, programming quickly in Common Lisp. Although the Lisp programming language is often associated with artificial intelligence, this is not a book on artificial intelligence.

The goal of this book is to introduce you to Common Lisp programming language. It is assumed that you already know how to program in another language, but if you are a complete beginner, you can still master the material in this book with some effort.

You will soon see in this book that Lisp is not just a language; it is also a programming environment and runtime environment. The beginning of this book introduces the basics of Lisp programming. In later chapters, you will develop interesting and non-trivial programs in Common Lisp that would be more difficult to implement in other languages and programming environments. The big win in programming in a Lisp environment is that you can set up an environment and interactively write new code and test new code in small pieces.

The combination of the stable Common Lisp language and an iterative Lisp programming environment is arguably much more productive than, for example, the best Java IDEs (e.g., IntelliJ Idea) and Microsoft's VisualStudio.Net (which admittedly makes writing web services almost trivial).

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