I’m going to start posting reviews of books that I read in 2010, starting with three introductions to Common Lisp. These three books are all quite good, but a little bit different from each other, so I thought reviewing them together might be helpful if someone is on the fence about buying one or all of them.

Paul Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp

I was interested to see how Paul Graham, surely one of Lisp’s most ardent champions, would present the language for beginners. Like his essays, the prose ANSI Common Lisp is clear and very well written. The programming examples are short and concise, and quite easy to follow. The examples are quite engaging and interesting: a sentence/poem generator named “Henley”, a simple ray-tracer, an object-oriented framework, and a logic language stick out in my memory.

But, I don’t think it’s necessarily the best introduction to Lisp in 2011, and not given the price of a new copy on Amazon. I found a cheap used copy, and that’s why I bought it. I wasn’t really disappointed, because I’m happy to make room for it on my shelf, but if you are new to Lisp, my recommendation would be to check out Practical Common Lisp or Land of Lisp, and after reading one of those, peruse the source for ANSI Common Lisp from Graham’s site.

His much more advanced macrology book, On Lisp, is more well known I think, and has fewer peers than this introductory text. That is even more expensive new (or used) due to the limited printing, I think, but Graham has graciously provided the text free from his site. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s high on my list of Lisp books to read.

Peter Seibel’s Practical Common Lisp

If you’re a serious, professional programmer who wants to learn Lisp, and doesn’t want to muck around with games (see Land of Lisp below) or with relatively academic examples, then this is probably the book you want. Peter Seibel’s book has a nice conversational tone and he doesn’t waste much time evangelizing. I think a blurb on the back of his other book, Coders at Work (review coming soon) says something like “Seibel asks the sort of questions only a fellow programmer would” and I think that’s kind of true of this book too, it’s definitely written as one programmer to another. He compares certain features to Python, Java, C++ and a few other languages, but doesn’t dwell on disparaging them too much, instead relying on Common Lisp features to stand on their own.

The examples in Practical Common Lisp are definitely practical, and could even be called a bit dry. This isn’t bad at all, and might even be more to some people’s taste. If concrete, “business-like” examples appeal to you more, this book would be a better read than Land of Lisp. If you get excited by more academic examples and prefer a lighter tone to examples in programming books, Land of Lisp might be a better bet. Or just read them both.

An impressive feat is that Seibel presents macros almost as soon as possible (in the third chapter) and demonstrates why Lisp’s macros are unique. I think Paul Graham has said that he tried to race to the macro chapter in ANSI Common Lisp as quickly as possible, but here Seibel has beaten him to it with a clever example that I thought was pretty easy to follow, even though it was my first exposure to “true” macros. Additionally, this chapter almost stands on its own, so you can forward a link to the online version (the whole book is up on Seibel’s site for free) to your coworkers who want to know what the fuss is about Lisp macros, but aren’t willing or interested in diving deep themselves.

Dr. Conrad Barski’s Land of Lisp

I’d read Dr. Barski’s online mini-tutorial “Casting SPELs in Lisp” a little while ago, so when I saw that he had finished Land of Lisp, and saw what an absolutely wonderful, whimsical music video he had produced for it, I bought a PDF copy immediately.

Using games to explore Common Lisp (or any programming language) is a pretty good idea, because games engage a wide variety of programming problems. I think reasonably motivated high schoolers could probably get through most of Land of Lisp, and I sort of wish it had been written when I was in high school. That being said, this book does has plenty for “grownups”. One of the cooler examples is using lazy evaluation to improve the efficiency of searching a game tree for a computer opponent’s best move. Barski also presents an SVG-based web interface to this game, and a simple HTTP server written using a socket library, getting into low-level details of web programming, which isn’t something you usually encounter in an introductory text to any programming language.

If you read and enjoyed “Casting SPELs in Lisp” or watched the music video on the Land of Lisp site, and you had a big smile on your face, you’ll probably like this book. If you hate fun, stick with Practical Common Lisp.

I think any of these books are fine first Lisp books, but there’s nothing stopping you from reading all of them. (I did after all) This year I plan to dive into some of the big, epic Common Lisp books, so I expect I’ll have a second round of Lisp reviews in a year, maybe a “Lisp 201” to follow this.