Customer Reviews

The Craft of Prolog (Logic Programming)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book, although not an introductory text, is widely considered the indespensable classic in writing good Prolog code. Try searching for it in the newsgroup comp.lang.prolog some time on DejaNews.

Prolog does a wonderful job of hiding what is really going on. This book reveals the wonderous truth.

The spirit of this book is exemplified by this quote: "If your Prolog code is ugly, the chances are that you either don't understand your problem or you don't understand your programming language, and in neither case does your code stand much chance of being efficient."

This book is O'Keefe's attempt to wipe out both root and branch of bad prolog code. A close reading of this book will not only give you a deep understanding of prolog and logic programming, but it will put you into mental contact with O'Keefe's profound insights into the kind of thinking necessary for being a topflight progammer.

I should mention that this book is not just for prolog programmers. It contains mindbending observations on programming available absolutly nowhere else. Unfortunately, like the scholar of the middle ages who had to master Latin and greek, you'll have to learn prolog before this book will yield up its treasures.

As O'Keefe unambiguously states in the opening paragraphs, this book should NOT be your first, or even your second, book on Prolog. There's no royal road to knowledge; you'll have to pay your dues. But after you've achieved a good foundation, this is the way forwared to enlightenment.

A common opinion nowadays, I suspect, is that Prolog is a neat hack that ran wildly out of control. And it is an opinion that is easy defend, and one with which I even have a lot of sympathy: not only does Prolog have substantial and not-really fixable problems as a 'serious' programming language, but it was also, in the aftermath of the 5th-generation hype, the inspiration for a lot of embarrassingly bad theoretical and quasi-theoretical research on 'logic' programming in the late 1980's and early 1990s. On the other hand, Prolog is also distinguished by some of the best books on progamming I have ever read: not just O'Keefe's 'The Craft of Prolog', but also, e.g., Sterling and Shapiro's 'Art of Prolog' crowd into the (depressingly small) queue formed behind the likes of 'Structure and Interpretation', 'the Science of Programming' and 'Programming Tools'. The existence of such books means that Prolog must have gotten _something_ substantial right.

Further, while in theory I divide the the set of all programming languages into clean Lisp dialects (i.e. scheme, ml, haskell) on the one hand, and other programming languages that are inadequate to the extent that they diverge from the Scheme/ML model on the other, I find that a lot of the time it is actually Prolog that provides the best tool for modelling the transaction-handling systems that I have to deal with in the course of earning my bread.

Whether you use Prolog or not, if you are serious about programming then you want to have a copy of this, simply because it shows how a world class programmer negotiates an unusual, but interesting, programming paradigm. And, as O'Keefe himself is, or at least used to be, fond of pointing out, your skill as a programmer is substantially correlated with the number of different such paradigms that you understand properly, and not very much with anything else.

Highly recommended if you are really interested in advanced programming.

I read this book in the library of my University. This book is *not* for beginners. Definitely. But in my opinion this is a *good* thing. This is a 5 star book: those who are not able to understand it, should study a bit more rather than lamenting about the book being too difficult.

An incredible book, the authors are clearly extremely smart. You will learn prolog. Has a lot of computer science theory and vocabulary, so it is not for the layman to pick up and read. I'm sure it also helps to know other languages first.

While the language, numbers, and examples in this book are rather dated, the wisdom it contains is timeless. There is experience you can get from this book that you can't get from any other source.

The contents are too confusing and it is definately not for the beginner/intermediate level who want to learn and understand more about prolog.