In my pursuit of some level of understanding of the why of Lisp rather than merely its syntax I bought a recently published Lisp book last week. The timing was dictated by Jen's desire to get free shipping on another book.

Successful Lisp bills itself as a tutorial for a wide variety of audiences including those who encountered Lisp before but couldn't see the point.

I like the tone of it, and have enjoyed the parts I have read so far. It reminds me of the best of the programming books I read in the 80s, the ones aimed at the semi-professional and hobbyist rather than the academic. It's written on the assumption that you already know how to program, and that you want to do useful work in Lisp, so the drudgery of explaining the trivial aspects of programming or the first principles list handling with tail recursion structures of Scheme are elided.

All in all, very promising.

Update 03-May-2008 - I picked this up again recently, so it is still in the "Being Read" pile. Not a great deal of what I read a year ago had stuck, but then I had also not tried to put any of it into practice. More recently, I have been poking around more seriously with Lisp and so I have been using this as my primary guide. There is lasting value in the book, even if the actual organisation of it make it less useful as a reference than perhaps I would like. Still, reference is well served in Lisp already, so no worries.

Posted by Dunx at April 30, 2007 09:18 AM