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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone here read LISP in small pieces? I've never used LISP but would still like to read it. Would you recommend it? (it's not cheap, otherwise I'd just buy it without the due diligence)

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I've read most of it. It's excellent. You have to pay a lot of attention to get anything out of it, much more than is required for SICP, PAIP, or The Little Schemer. You will spend enough time at it that the monetary outlay will be insignificant...

In my opinion it's verbose and more complicated than necessary. If you just want to understand programming language design with a lispy flavor I would suggest Essentials of Programming Languages by Friedman, Wand (not much theory, scheme implementations of everything) and Design Concepts in Programming Languages by Gifford, Turbak, Sheldon (which uses s-exps to represent ASTs, but otherwise is not lisp centric). If you already know some PL theory and don't care too much about lisp, Bob Harper's Practical Foundations for Programming Languages is great, full of interesting topics (but it doesn't hold your hand as much as the previous two)

The content is of great quality that's for sure. Don't regret having a copy.

You can also do an HN search for it. Here is one excerpt from an HN comment: "... So for example, a book like "Lisp in Small Pieces", which taught me the concept of Continuations, was considerably hard on the conceptual side. This also took at least a month of conscious connecting the dots between what was in the text, tail-recursion, and those funny callback functions I've been writing in nodejs, before i "Got it".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2418459

You can find it on the typical pirate sites (pdf and epub), I haven't been able to find sample chapters elsewhere. Of course, if you like it, buy the original to get the physical book :)

I wouldn’t recommend it unless you are already an expert in Lisp.

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