Paul Graham's On Lisp in HTML | Hacker News Reader

Paul Graham's On Lisp in HTML

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54 pointsZak15 comments

The original page for this is: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html and apparently it is available for download for free: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html

Am I the only one in this whole world who prefers to download just one single html file with everything included?

Nope, you are not alone. I actually always preferred projects that had their docs available as pdf, but now I am thinking that epub will be my preferred.

Ok, here we have an ebook, in one single html file.

http://code.google.com/p/onlisp/

Is this a legitimate copy? Meaning, is PG or the publisher likely to get it taken down?

I am tempted to archive it and not share on the off chance it gets taken down. It's hard to feel bad about making a single personal copy since PG already gives away the PDF version.

I believe it is not a legitimate copy, however, I remember seeing it several years ago. I think it was posted to reddit when most of the people on reddit came from comp.lang.lisp. I hope that suggests it isn't going to go away any time soon.

It is not technically legitimate. I believe the author has turned a blind eye and would rather this discussion not continue.

Chapter 7 is the best explanation of macros ever.

A few years ago, I bought a print book on Lulu. Paul Graham had released the book into the public domain (?) and some kind person had spent an hour or so uploading it to Lulu.com and the book was very inexpensive because I only had to pay the low printing costs (perhaps about $8). I just looked on Lulu and could not find the link however. Assuming that it is OK with Paul Graham, it would be great if someone re-uploaded it to Lulu as a free book (i.e., just pay for the printing costs).

This book is just about a mandatory reference for Common Lisp, although I use "ANSI Common LISP" more often as a quick reference.

It takes five seconds to upload the pdf to Lulu yourself and you can take advantage of their discount when buying a book that you yourself produced.

I am confident that Paul has never released the book "into the public domain". He does have the book available at no charge on his web site, but that is not the same thing. Last I knew, Paul owned the copyright (I believe it was reverted to him by the original publisher years after the book was last printed). He has just been generous enough to provide a PDF for all who are interested in reading it.

Over the last four years or so, I keep hearing that Paul is going to republish it (on actual paper). I think he has just been too busy with other things of higher priority to get that done. I hope he doesn't abandon that idea. I think it is an important book that has far too few hard copies available. Online copies are wonderful, and I'm very glad that the book is available in that format, but as can be seen by my multiple bookshelves, dead tree copies still provide a pleasant experience not reproducable by a computer. I know many other hackers share that opinion, and prefer to have the paper copy on the shelf.

So, Paul, if you are listening, is there a chance "On Lisp" will make it to the printer again any time soon?

I can't seem to get to the site at work, but someone posted the missing images (from the On Lisp book) a while ago ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1079973

I've just finished cleaning up and merging the first 28 sections of the linked HTML (Preface, Chapters 1-25, Notes and Packages) into a single PDF filtered via Readability. 312 pages of PDF that looks better on my mobile than the official PDF does.

Unfortunately my PDF is 4x larger and misses out on the Contents and Index sections as well as the images. The actual Lisp snippets look fine.

Japanese version, just for your curiosity:

http://www.komaba.utmc.or.jp/~flatline/onlispjhtml/

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