
Peter Norvig's book reviews on Amazon - kbob
http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A3G545YMVB6CUZ/
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ionfish
His review of Black's 'Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition' made me
chuckle, and accorded with my own experience of the book.

    
    
        To the reviewer who said "I was looking forward to a detailed insight into
        neural networks in this book. Instead, almost every page is plastered up
        with sigma notation", that's like saying about a book on music theory
        "Instead, almost every page is plastered with black-and-white ovals (some
        with sticks on the edge)." Or to the reviewer who complains this book is
        limited to the mathematical side of neural nets, that's like complaining
        about a cookbook on beef being limited to the carnivore side.
    

[http://www.amazon.com/review/RZ7FBFHHLJHYE/ref=cm_cr_rdp_per...](http://www.amazon.com/review/RZ7FBFHHLJHYE/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm)

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akv
The author is Chris Bishop...

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tfh
The author is Chris Bishop... who wrote one of the "essential" machine
learning books :

[http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-Learning-
Informati...](http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-Learning-Information-
Statistics/dp/0387310738/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275227337&sr=8-1)

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mark_l_watson
I had the very good fortune of having Peter Norvig as a technical editor of
one of my books. Unfortunately there were a lot of problems with my book that
needed fixed and I appreciated the precise way he told me what he didn't like.
He is certainly one of the best computer scientists on the planet, and also a
very nice guy.

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rayvega
From his 'On LISP' review:

 _...In Graham's prose, like his code, every word counts..._

Fascinating to read Peter Norvig describe ten years ago what most people tend
to say about pg's essays and general writing style.

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asdflkj
Somebody should show this to people in #lisp. They uniformly worship Norvig
and hate PG.

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corruption
What are the complaints against pg?

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l0stman
My gut feeling is that it has something to do with Arc. Some people tends to
think it's just a regular Lisp with shorter keywords and that there's nothing
really innovative in it. The problem is that pg kept the code private for too
long while advocating publicly the power of the language and criticizing
Common Lisp.

So when he finally released it, some lispers were disappointed because they've
been waiting for something really disruptive. And it backfired as most of the
time, the harshest critics comes from your disappointed sympathizers.

That being said, I don't hang that much on IRC so I have no real back-story
supporting this.

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asdflkj
It started long before PG released Arc.

My theory is that because most of those people are very intelligent yet
utterly ineffectual, they act as a kind of support group for one another. They
view Lisp as a monastic order where in order to keep the tradition alive, one
is forced by the circumstances to give up all his worldly ambitions. PG didn't
buy it, and succeeded. So to keep the ideology consistent, you need to
introduce the assumption that PG is not a "true" Lisper.

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aaronkaplan
His review of the Talking Heads CD set is dated July 27, 2001, but mentions
"Sept 11." Conspiracy theorists take note.

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javert
That's actually pretty interesting and quirky. I wonder what happened.

Could he have initially posted before Sept. 11 and then edited the post after?
Or did Amazon screw something up with the dates?

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pmichaud
In big systems like amazon's it's not uncommon to fudge something that's not
critical. They probably lost data during a migration 8 years ago, or some
similar disaster and decided to just rebuild a replica by generating plausible
dates.

That kind of crap happens all the time.

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mburney
Definitely some books I will check out after reading this list ("Lisp in small
pieces" for example). Also enjoyed the fact that Norvig is a Talking Heads
fan. I always thought of Norvig as a new wave kind of guy.

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kev009
His Dietel reviews are hilarious.

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micheljansen
I feel confident finding so many books I own for my studies are getting rave
reviews by Norvig. Then again, we do use a book he wrote with Stuart Russell
as well in one of the courses :)

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SapphireSun
Oh I LOVE that book. A Modern Introduction to AI / 2e right? The authors have
such a relaxed tone and explain things so well AND they cover a huge amount of
material.

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abecedarius
There's a 3rd edition now. (AI: A Modern Approach, actually.)

