On Lisp - dead tree version
Sunday, December 12, 2004
  Paul Graham's book
On Lisp is rightly considered one of the best advanced
CL books available. There are a number of on-line sources of
electronic versions of the book
(I've discussed
those before); however, many people prefer a real, dead tree
version of a book. Unfortunately, it is out of print and the only
used copy on Amazon is
listed at $224.99. That's a bit outrageous, but I guess that must
be what the market will bear at the moment. For those of you not inclined to pay out that sort of money, there are a couple of other alternatives. First of all, apparently a new edition of the book is in the works. If you have the patience to wait for it, that is probably going to be the best option. However, for people who are desperate to get a copy, another alternative is to try to buy the book from a source outside the USA. I just recently discovered the Pricenoia.com service, which checks multiple Amazon sites for the same book. Apparently, the Japanese, UK, and German Amazon sites all have copies for sale at between US$67-US$80. So (if you're one of the first readers of this post), you may still have a chance at getting an original copy! Update-2004-12-13: Paul Potts emailed me with a suggestion of an alternative way to get a paper copy of On Lisp - print off the PDF file and have it bound. Printing costs (with heavy paper, binding and a plastic cover) were only about US$30. However, the PDF version is missing the diagrams in the book, so it would be nice if there were some on-line version of those available as well. |
