Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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From: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer)
Subject: Re: Learning Common Lisp
Message-ID: <1997Jan16.084300.17113@wavehh.hanse.de>
Reply-To: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de
Organization: '(a (cons structive organization))
References: <32DD555C.4E95@horizon.hit.net>
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 97 08:43:00 GMT
Lines: 40

Robert Bagot <rbagot@horizon.hit.net> writes:

>	I have been using Autolisp to program cad applications for the past 5
>years.  I am really amazed at the power of even this small
>implementation.  I recently downloaded the Allegro CL lite for windows
>hoping to find some way to apply what knowledge I already have to this
>environment. Could someone suggest a good book or where to start? 
>  The main problem I seem to have (right at this point) is determining
>which of the primitive functions are common to both environments (i.e.
>setf, setq,). Is this a sane thing to undertake? 

I think the best book here would be "ANSI Common Lisp" by Paul Graham. 

It is of course a serious problem to focus on a consistent useful
subset of Common Lisp. If found reading the manuals for Symbolics
Genera very useful, especially "Symbolics Common Lisp Language
Concepts". They present a clear view of what they think is needed to
be useful.

Also, mastering the CL library is not all. When learning Common Lisp,
you will have to master some somewhat unusual concepts of Common Lisp
as well, where learning doesn't mean reading function specs.

These include multi-binding symbols and related functions, scope,
packages, keywords and reader macros. I also found Symbolics manuals
to be good at explaining these, but that may be because they just
happend to be the book I read when my view of these concepts got
clearer, don't know.

"Lisp Style and Design" my Miller and Benson is also quite good to
make up your mind about Cl features.

Hope this helps.

Martin
--
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Martin_Cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de http://cracauer.cons.org  Fax.: +4940 5228536
"As far as I'm concerned,  if something is so complicated that you can't ex-
 plain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway"- Calvin
