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Loving Common Lisp, or the Savvy Programmer's Secret Weapon
This is the fourth edition of my book "Loving Common Lisp, or the Savvy Programmer's Secret Weapon." I removed some of the older material from the earlier editions and added application examples for deep learning, back-propagation and Hopfield neural networks, using the CLML machine learning library, heuristic search, and using Common Lisp clients MongoDB, Solr, CouchDB, and relational databases. For the older 3rd edition I added a chapter using my Natural Language Processing (NLP) library and a short chapter on information gathering. The purpose of this book is to provide a quick introduction to Common Lisp and then provide the user with many fun and useful examples for using Common Lisp. Before you buy this book you can first look at the programming examples at
510 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 6, 2016
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About the author
Mark Watson
31 books5 followersThere is more than one author with this Name.
Mark Watson is a Ruby and Java Consultant and Author.
Mark Watson is a Ruby and Java Consultant and Author.
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January 10, 2017
Short, sharp, precise, pragmatic -- it is not SICP, nor it is "Practical Common Lisp" (both books are not without their merits, but they do not fit the bill).
This is a hacker's introduction to CL, getting you from 0 to 100 in less than 3 seconds. No endless musings of virtues of tail recursion and immutability, just a jet-fast overview of language features for those who already have 3-4 other languages in the belt (as most of us do, before trying to approach Common Lisp).
"Here's how we do arithmetic. List manipulation. Strings. Basic data structures. Want mutability? Mutable variables are defined like this. Global variables are here. Here's your first macro. Some I/O. Networking. Package system. OO stuff." -- this is about 50 pages, believe it or not.
"Let's play with some cool kid's libraries. How about full-text search and NLP? Here's how to load the library. Here are a few examples. Documentation is there. You can ask for advice here. Now go code and sin no more".
I wish other programming books were written like this.
This is a hacker's introduction to CL, getting you from 0 to 100 in less than 3 seconds. No endless musings of virtues of tail recursion and immutability, just a jet-fast overview of language features for those who already have 3-4 other languages in the belt (as most of us do, before trying to approach Common Lisp).
"Here's how we do arithmetic. List manipulation. Strings. Basic data structures. Want mutability? Mutable variables are defined like this. Global variables are here. Here's your first macro. Some I/O. Networking. Package system. OO stuff." -- this is about 50 pages, believe it or not.
"Let's play with some cool kid's libraries. How about full-text search and NLP? Here's how to load the library. Here are a few examples. Documentation is there. You can ask for advice here. Now go code and sin no more".
I wish other programming books were written like this.
Displaying 1 of 1 review