16 ANSI Common Lisp
Graham has an excellent Lisp coding style. His code is maintainable and
portable. Function definitions are short and well-motivated, and, for the most
part, variable and function names are clear and helpful.
— Chris Riesbeck
The aim of this book is to teach you Common Lisp quickly and thoroughly.
It is two books in one:
- Tutorial that explains all the essential concepts of Lisp programming;
- Up-to-date summary of ANSI Common Lisp describing every operator in the
language.
It assumes no prior knowledge of Lisp. It begins with the most basic concepts,
and pays special attention to the points that tend to confuse someone seeing
Lisp for the first time.
The best way to learn Lisp is to use it. This book is designed to get you
started as quickly as possible. After a brief Introduction,
- Chapter Two explains, in 21 pages, everything you need to start writing Lisp
programs;
- Chapters 3-9 introduce the essential elements of Lisp programming. These
chapters pay special attention to critical concepts like the role of pointers
in Lisp, the use of recursion to solve problems, and the significance of
first-class functions.
- Chapters 10-14 cover macros, CLOS, operations on list structure,
optimization, and advanced topics like packages and read-macros.
- Chapters 15-17 sum up the lessons of the preceding chapters in three examples
of real applications:
- a program for making logical inferences,
- an HTML generator, and
- an embedded language for object-oriented programming.
- Four Appendices A-D:
- include a guide to debugging,
- source code for 58 Common Lisp operators,
- a summary of the differences between ANSI Common Lisp andprevious versions of the language, and
- a refernce describing every operatorin ANSI Common Lisp.
- Section of notes containing clarifications, references, additional code, and
occasional heresies.