Online sources of On Lisp
Friday, May 14, 2004
  I find that I keep referring back to Paul Graham's book
On Lisp as it has such a wealth of CL programming knowledge in
it. His coverage of Lisp macros is not equaled in any other Lisp
book. Also, it's a fun read as Paul's enthusiasm for Lisp keeps
cropping up throughout the book and he's a very good writer to boot. I have a number of different sources for reading the book,
depending on where I am, what I'm doing, and what I'm trying to use
the book for:I have the dead tree version of the book which I read when I'm at home or on the bus. However, I often want to look up sections of the book when I don't have the hard copy on me. Paul Graham has generously made the book available for download and there are Postscript and PDF versions of the book available on his site. However, I don't find PDF files very convenient to read online. They are great when you want a printed copy, but awkward when you want to work with snippets of code from the book. Therefore, for most of my online browsing, I've downloaded the Texinfo version of On Lisp to read from within Emacs. This is convenient as I'm only a keystroke away from trying out CL code in the book. However, neither the PDF/PS nor the Texinfo versions of On Lisp are very convenient when you want to link to a specific section in the book (e.g. -- in a weblog or a news/email posting). Just recently, though, I came across an HTML version of On Lisp on a Japanese site. This is the only freely accessible HTML version that I'm aware of. Just goes to show you that (if you look long enough) you can find most things on the Internet. :-) Whichever version you use, this book is definitely one of the best books for really showing what makes Lisp different from other programming languages. |
