

A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation - jwdunne
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/

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calpaterson
I learnt programming from this book - it is excellent.

~~~
DougWebb
I just read through the first bunch of pages of both this book and SICP. I'm
familiar with Lisp and I've been a programmer for many years, but I've never
really been comfortable with Lisp. I have to say that SICP's approach seems
much easier to learn from than this book's approach. Just a few pages in, and
I felt like I understood how Lisp programs are structured well enough to
figure out how any Lisp program works. The diagrams and exercises in this book
just seem distracting and too verbose for the concepts they're trying to
convey.

It may be a learning-style thing.

~~~
octopus
I think you've found the Lisp found in SICP more easier simply because Scheme
(the Lisp flavour used in SICP) is purposely more concise than Common Lisp
(the language from the this book).

Some teachers claim they could teach you Scheme in about one hour (see the
excellent course of Brian Harvey).

Common Lisp is a different kind of beast.

------
hsmyers
While I'm busy kicking the kids off of my front lawn, let me pause to say that
it fails in the same way that Emacs fails---first thing I want to see in a
book on a process (language, editor, what-have-you) is how to get it started
and how to get out. Makes me a curmudgeon, but hey I'm old and came by it
honestly... OBTW, it is otherwise a great read and since it is generic to all
Common Lisps, of course it doesn't have the necessary how to start and how to
stop---(clisp [if installed] and an eventual (quit)), for those who were
wondering :)

