If for no other reason, you should buy Land of Lisp because of the extreme levels of unadulterated nerdery filling its pages. The price of the book is almost worth that very spectacle alone. However, as an added bonus the content of the book is top drawer. The first incarnation of Lisp was discovered by John McCarthy over 50 years ago, so it's difficult to imagine that a book on the subject bringing a fresh perspective, but Land of Lisp pulls it off in spades. The book manages to carve its own unique niche in the Lisp book landscape through a masterful blend of cartoons, game development examples, interesting prose, and a highly sharpened whit.
The author, Conrad Barski M.D., takes the reader through a whirlwind tour of Common Lisp and some of the fundamental principles of game development, but interestingly enough it never feels rushed. He accomplishes this feat by sticking to a very important strategy summarized as, "providing something useful at every stage". That is, every example in the book is meant to fit into the context of the larger game examples (e.g. a text adventure, Dice of Doom, etc.) while simultaneously teaching a lesson about Common Lisp *and* provide utility in isolation. It's really a thing of beauty the way that Mr. Barski manages to build useable games piecemeal while teaching important concepts along the way. To illustrate what I mean, let me give an example. The Dice of Doom game example starts with a very small 2x2 board and the program parts needed to represent it. Mr. Barski then builds pieces on top of this substrate to generate positions, while extolling the virtues of decoupling the logic of the game from its representation. It's at this point that the game is playable against a human opponent, but at no previous stage was the code left in a state of flux -- each one was fully amenable to tinkering, tweaking, and experimentation. As an added bonus, the whole implementation by this stage was an incredible 13 lines! (that is actually not true, it's more than that, but by using Common Lisp the implementation was incredibly concise) As if this feat was not impressive enough, Mr. Barski then adds game AI into the mix while explaining the famous minimax search algorithm. He then makes the game more efficient using some techniques common in functional programming, including: closures, memoization, tail-calls (with caveats), and lazy programming. As expected the game itself becomes more feature rich as these lessons progress as stronger AI (i.e. better evaluation) is added, more efficient search techniques are introduced (i.e. alpha-beta pruning), and heuristics are used.
All in all, I am very impressed with the quality of Land of Lisp. As a co-author of a Lisp programming book I appreciate the amount of effort required to pull off a genuinely unique book -- I would be happy to achieve a fraction of the quality of Land of Lisp. This book will appeal to the long-time Lisper and the neophyte and I highly recommend buying it today.
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Un libro fantánstido de programación en Lisp
Reviewed in Spain on October 10, 2021