The Little LISPer, Third Edition (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Many readers will be delighted and edified by Friedman and Felleisen's novel approach to the recursive programming language Lisp."
- Raymond Smullyan, author of To Mock a Mockingbird



"This is a wonderful extension of an already lovely book. Dan Friedman and Matthias Felleisen are in love with recursive thinking, and with Lisp as a vehicle for explaining it.... The authors carry total novices from childish 'toys' all the way to extremely abstract concepts deep in the heart of logic and computation. And yet from beginning to end, it's done with humor and obvious, infectious joy ... by no means just another guide to programming tricks and tools ... it is a rich, spicy, deep dish. If it were a pizza I would love eating it!"
- Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

There are surprises in store for the diligent reader of this masterful introduction to recursion as a fundamental tool for expressing and solving problems. With wit and wisdom, The Little LISPer unfolds some of the most beautiful concepts in mathematics, computer science, and logic.

The authors' goal is to show that recursive thinking is first of all fun, that it is powerful, and that the programming language Lisp allows one to express ideas recursively and naturally. There are hard problems along the way, but their solution brings mastery of recursive, functional, and meta-linguistic abstractions, developing skills in the underlying creative programming in Lisp. The Little LISPer is self-contained: an interpreter for the language is developed using the tools of the book itself . --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 206 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 3 edition (March 30, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0023397632
• ISBN-13: 978-0023397639
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #626,998 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a bright clear gem, February 5, 1998

By	RattyDaddy - See all my reviews

I read this beautiful little book as a child and it has never left me. It left me with a clear and straightforward understanding of the basics of LISP -- in this it remains possibly the most enjoyable and time-efficient technical book I've ever read, but much more than this it is a book I still often call to mind as an example of good pedagogy or simply of good design in any field.

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's a five-star book, but..., December 23, 2001

By A Customer

...it's been obsoleted by its own fouth edition. No place on the listing for this book do I find a hint that this is the third edition of a book currently in its FOURTH edition. They renamed the book The Little Schemer for the fourth revision. Buy that book instead.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best first book on programming in any language., October 28, 1999

By	Edward Mokurai Cherlin (Cupertino, CA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I gave an earlier edition of The Little LISPer a glowing review in Byte in 1980. It was then the best introductory book on programming, regardless of language, and I still haven't seen anything to compare with it.

The greatest strength of LISP is its firm base in the essentials of the mathematics of computability, including Goedel's recursive functions and Church's Lambda calculus. It uses a single data structure, the linked list, and a minimum of programming primitives, all with well-known mathematical properties. For those who don't know the mathematics, this base in simple concepts means that LISP is one of the easiest programming languages to understand, and at the same time one of the most powerful.

The greatest strength of Little LISPer is its easy and natural sequence of steps for introducing data types and structures (numeric, text, and Boolean atoms organized in lists and trees) along with the recursive programming structures that are natural for creating and processing them.

I have just ordered the third edition for my son who is learning programming (if he can get it away from me).