Re: What next after 'Practical' ??

I've been going back and forth between Practical Common Lisp and ANSI
Common Lisp (with Common Lisp the Language, 2nd ed as a reference). I
find that PCL and ACL complement eachother fairly well.

PCL has a lot of helpful utility codes that are well organized by
chapter. It has project ideas that I'm likely to take and modify and
make my own (therefore getting a lot of help on the project by reading
the right chapter). It is also very approachable for this newbie.

ACL, on the other hand, is what is stretching my mind, and it sounds
like that is what you are missing. Paul Graham uses hard examples
(always short though, no more than a page or two). Every time I look at
one of graham's functions, even if it's just a few lines long (which
they almost always are) it makes me think pretty hard. Reading ACL gets
tiring though (not boring, but actually makes me tired) so I end up
going back to PCL fairly quickly. ACL is very intense. Sometimes I like
that, but sometimes it's too much for me.

I would recommend either going back and forth between them, as I have,
or reading PCL first. Even after going all the way through PCL, I have
a feeling that anything from chapter 4 onward in ACL will stretch your
mind at least a little bit.

Note that Paul Graham actually considers ACL to be a beginner's book.
I'm going to try hard to finish it this week and move onto his advanced
book, On Lisp.

I've heard people speak highly of Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial
Intelligence also. I haven't yet gotten a copy of that.

By the way, I set up a signature with my webpage, but I don't see it at
the end of my posts. Can anyone else see it? I'm wondering if google
groups hides it from me or if I messed up the setup.

.

Relevant Pages

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