It’s been a while since I acquired PAIP. I can’t say I’ve read all of it over the past couple months, but I’ve read most of it.
The initial chapters that give an intro to Common Lisp seem largely useless to me. There are better books to introduce Common Lisp (especially now that we […]

I got through the first four chapters of PAIP yesterday and today. It’s good so far. I had reservations about spending $80 on a book, but it’s 950 pages and almost all of it is good stuff, from what I can see at a glance. Little space is wasted on introduction material […]

This post will probably come back to haunt me, but functional programming doesn’t sit well with me. I’m trying again to read through SICP. Last time I tried, I lost track of it and gave up after a few chapters. This time I hope to persevere, and I’m trying to go more […]

Part of what Ableson and Sussman keep saying in these lovely lecture videos is that a good way to solve a problem is to divide it into layers of abstraction, where one layer of abstraction gets its work done by using a “language” that you wrote in the abstraction layer immediately below it. They […]

Having read and re-read Practical Common Lisp probably four or five times at this point if you add it all up, and having skimmed Graham’s On Lisp enough to realize I need to come back to it later, I decided to move on to Structure and Interpreation of Computer Programs, which is a book available […]

Paul Graham’s On Lisp is available in PDF form (and Postscript) for free download, so I thought I’d give it a read. It’s an older book (early 90’s) and you can tell. It has a lot of good knowledge if you can make it past some of the things that obscure the more […]

I got K&R (the ANSI C version) as one of the going-away presents from my current / last job, and I just finished reading it.
A lot of what’s in the book is sort of review for me now but there were some things I’d never seen before. For example in the book […]

I’m about halfway through Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, and it’s pretty good. I can’t read Smalltalk very well, so that’s an impediment, but most of the code is C++ so it’s OK. The book itself is very well-written. The patterns are laid out in a clear and thorough format, […]

Thank you very much to numerodix’s latest blog entry, which caused me to pay extra attention when upgrading system packages this week. I do read my elogs, but I don’t read it as carefully as I should. I know I would have missed the warning about expat1 -> 2 necessitating a revdep-rebuild. […]

If only I had a dime for every time Stroustrup used the phrase “This would be disastrous”. It can refer to everything from misuse of pointers, to making your destructors non-virtual in a class that will be a base class for some derived class, to all sorts of other C++ pitfalls. I got […]