What I've been reading
Nov 29, 2005I may not have been blogging it but I’ve been doing some reading. I’m not sure what to make of this list:
- Lee Parks’ Total Control. Readable with nice glossy pictures. I didn’t learn anything particularly new but I will use the drill diagrams in my next parking lot practice.
- David S. Touretzkys Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation. Possibly the best $2.75 I’ve spent on a programming textbook. Genuinely entertaining for an introductory text though the LISP dialect is outdated and I was sometimes frustrated piecing it together on a modern implementation. I may throw a current edition to my son when he’s old enough.
- Eugene Charniak’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. I don’t have an interest in A.I. but it has a LISP orientation and presents two very good chapters on Parsing and Searching. For $2.25, I couldn’t pass it by.
- Guy L. Steele’s Common Lisp: The Language. Actually, that link is to the reference I should have bought. I mistakenly picked up the 1984 edition. Fortunately, it was only $2.80 and electronic versions of CLtL2 are in the CMU AI Repository.