The Department of Computer Science & Engineering
cse@buffalo
COMMON LISP: AN INTERACTIVE APPROACH

COMMON LISP: An Interactive Approach

Stuart C. Shapiro

Computer Science Press
An imprint of W. H. Freeman and Company
The book publishing arm of Scientific American
41 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10010
20 Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2NQ, England

1992
358 + xxi pages
ISBN 0-7167-8218-9


This book is out of print. The publisher has returned the copyright and rights to me, the author. I am making it available here in pdf, and dvi formats, and in two versions of ps format, a heavier font and a finer font, under the following conditions: hardcopies must retain the title and copyright pages; web links must point to this page rather than to a separate copy of the dvi, ps, or pdf file; quotes and other copies of material in the book, including programs, must include the citation: "Stuart C. Shapiro, COMMON LISP: An Interactive Approach. W. H. Freeman, New York, 1992."
Thanks to Brian Mastenbrook for the pdf and the finer-font ps files.

The notes from an on-line course, CSE 202, using this book, and given in Fall, 2000, is available. This course is not currently being given. Do not send exercises to the author.

An even more up-to-date, faster introduction to Common Lisp, written in Summer 2004 and somewhat biased toward Allegro Common Lisp, is Stuart C. Shapiro & David R. Pierce, A Short Course in Common Lisp.


Book Jacket Quotes
quoted with permission of those quoted
"Stuart Shapiro has done a fine job of updating his widely used Lisp text ... Shapiro guides the reader through an interactive, hands-on approach that encourages learning from experience through an extensive and carefully graded series of exercises."
--- Guy L. Steele, Jr.

"It's such a great little text."
--- Selmer Bringsjord, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

"your book is well written and my students are enjoying their work. thanks! ... by contrast, i have used [another] lisp text in the past. a good resource, but yours is much more student friendly and well paced."
--- Don Thompson, Pepperdine University

A Dozen Reasons to Adopt it
Table of Contents
Errata
(to the published, printed version; the on-line versions have been corrected)

Each short chapter is followed by a set of carefully ordered exercises. It is best for the student to do every exercise, but for guidance they are coded as follows.
(r)
A review of the material in the text so that the student can see for herself that Common Lisp behaves as described in the text.

(i)
An instructional exercise that provides information not otherwise introduced in the text.

(d)
A drill exercise providing additional practice with Common Lisp.

(u)
A utility exercise to prepare or modify programs the student will be expected to use in later work.

(p1)
A project 1 exercise, one of a series of exercises distributed through the text so that, by doing them all, the student will write a small rule-based system, and use that to implement a small grammar of English and a miniversion of the program Eliza. An overview and specification of this project is available as a pdf document, a dvi document, and as a PostScript document.

(p2)
A project 2 exercise, one of a series of exercises distributed through the text so that, by doing them all, the student will write an interactive desk calculator. An overview and specification of this project is available as a pdf document, as a dvi document, and as a PostScript document.

Last modified: Thu Nov 13 16:37:19 2014
Stuart C. Shapiro <shapiro@buffalo.edu>

REASONS TO ADOPT | TABLE OF CONTENTS | ERRATA | PUBLISHER'S COMMON LISP | COMPUTER SCIENCE PRESS | W. H. FREEMAN | UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO |