Customer Reviews

The Little LISPer, Third Edition

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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.

...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.

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).

The pinnacle of the act of teaching is to be simultaneously clear, simple, interesting, and complete. This is rarely achieved in person, and almost never in writing; "The Little LISPer" achieves it. I believe this defines what a teaching book can be. It is brief. It can be read in snippets, at any pace. It will maintain the interest of anyone who comes to learn. The reader is left ready to write Lisp code, no matter what background precedes it.

I read this book in high school in 1982; it taught me enough that five years later I aced a four-credit independent study class in Lisp (at an Ivy League college) without any further reading. Hey, I *told* him I already knew Lisp! Dr. Friedman, I hope you come across this endorsement some day; please accept my thanks for creating this wonderful little gem. (Pass the pizza, please, I have a little more to write...)

I cannot endorse this book highly enough. If you want to learn Lisp, I know of no better place to go.

When I was teaching mathematics at a small college in the 1980's, like everyone else we were expanding our computer science department. In talking with a colleague, our discussions went to the area of programming in Lisp and Prolog. This generated some interest in me about Lisp, so we purchased an inexpensive Lisp interpreter and I read this book. As I worked through the examples, the contrast with Basic and Fortran, the two languages I was familiar with, was striking.
Despite my initial difficulties, I continued to slowly plow through the examples and began to appreciate the power of Lisp. It took some time, yet was well worth it. The examples take you through the features of Lisp using the programmatic equivalent of baby steps. Even though this edition was written almost two decades ago, it is still an first tool in the learning of Lisp.

I'm still struggling with lisp, but this book was simple, to the point, and clear. I didnt even get annoyed by his goofy attempts at humor.