Re: The library metric

From: Brandon J. Van Every (try_vanevery_at_mycompanyname_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 03/17/05 

Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 17:57:16 -0800

Ulrich Hobelmann wrote:
> Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
>> The Seattle Public Library system http://www.spl.org has a pretty
>> good array of technical books. Not so in the case of Lisp. All I
>> can find are:
> [...]
>> If you're in a major metro area, I'm curious if your municipal
>> library system has any better showing for Lisp? I would expect
>> university libraries to fare much better. For instance, the U.
>> Washington online catalog shows 76 entries for Lisp.
>
> Is that important? I wouldn't expect an ordinary library have any
> useful books in CS. That's what universities are for. If a book is
> really good, I usually buy it myself anyway.

I think in a tech center like Seattle it is indeed important. The Seattle
Public Library has a large sampling of technical books - obviously not
uber-technical books like you'd find in a university research stack, but
certainly, many bases are covered.

My trip to Barnes & Noble yielded only 1 Lisp book on the shelf. "Lisp, 3rd
Edition" by Winston & Horn, 1989. I probably read the 1st or 2nd edition as
a senior in high school in 1988! Either that or I'm misremembering and read
it on my own recognizance in the 1992..94 time period. Either way that's
awhile ago.

Went to see if Borders was any better. 0 Lisp books in evidence on the
shelf. They had a helpful "Title Sleuth" kiosk, so I did searches with
that. The first 27 entries were out of print - not good marketing at a
kiosk, that! I think there were 100+ entries total, many requiring a 7 day
or less shipment, others out of print again.

The 3 books in the Seattle Public Library were useless. The 1984 books were
too old, and the 2001 book was mostly about information theory. It just
happened to be done in Lisp.

So, the main value of my trip was getting some nice exercise walking
downtown, and blowing off signature gathering on a freezing rain / sleeting
afternoon. Oh, and I took advantage of the library's high bandwidth
connection to do 50 minutes of websurfing about Lisp and Scheme jobs. I
started qualifying my searches with Seattle and I found... my own group,
SeaFunc. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SeaFunc Makes sense, as we merged /
co-scheduled with a local Lisp group recently. I used to be on the ML side
of things. I am happy to have achieved a sense of recursion in real life
that I've never achieved in code. 

-- 
Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA
20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.

Relevant Pages

  • The library metric
    ... The Seattle Public Library system http://www.spl.org has a pretty good array ... Not so in the case of Lisp. ... No books at all. ... I would expect university libraries ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: The library metric
    ... > of technical books. ... Not so in the case of Lisp. ... I would expect university libraries ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Newbie in Lisp
    ... There are three introductory books that are inexpensive or free: ... Wilensky's 'Common Lispcraft' ... Barsky 'Land of Lisp' ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: OReilly Lisp? Looks like it is just a matter of time...
    ... * Books on topics that have dismal sales despite quality books ... > sold dismally in the past (for instance, LISP, LaTeX, or Web-based ... > big "fuck you" to the Lisp community. ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Any good tutorials for libraries?
    ... you need to adapt cl-ncurses to the needs of your implementation ... And why isn't there many books or tutorials on it? ... commercial use of Lisp not academic so I can cover things not present ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)