Last Saturday (March 12, 2016), I got my most eagerly awaited book from Amazon.com. Yes, I am talking about Common Lisp Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach authored by Dr.Edmund Weitz.
Of course, if you have been programming in Lisp for a couple of years, you would have definitely heard of Dr.Edi Weitz, and most probably you would have used at least one of his several libraries. I have used his REDUNZL, DRAKMA and CL-PPCRE. If you recall, my previous post on Converting Text to Music used his DRAKMA library.
Coming back to the book, it is a piece of jewel. There are 22 chapters in the book and each chapter discusses several commonly encountered programming issues with a nice explanation of how to solve them. There is considerable breadth and depth. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the chapters on Concurrency (using Bordeaux Threads) and Error Handling. There is elaborate discussion on Optimization in a separate chapter. Building GUI apps, Interfacing to other languages and Persistence are also covered in sufficient detail. I was pleasantly surprised to find even a brief discussion on Lisp for Mobile devices.
Overall, an amazing book and one that must be on your desk if you are a serious Lisp developer. Mind you, this book is not a Lisp tutorial, so do not buy the book thinking you can start learning Lisp from it. There are many other good books for that. See my related post.
Title: Common Lisp Recipes – A Problem-Solution Approach
Author: Dr.Edmund Weitz
Publisher: Apress
Year: 2016
Pages: 745
Recent Comments