How To (Start to) Learn Lisp in 21 Days

My quest to learn Lisp continues, but I've reached a major milestone: I'm ready to start writing code. For me, learning a new technology usually starts with reading about it for a while, trying to form a mental model of the landscape. It took a bit of searching, but with some help, I was able to find three resources that were just what I needed. I thought I'd post them here for anyone else interested in the language. All three of these are free and available online in their entirety.

 

1. Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation. A really excellent beginner's book. Extremely approachable, good narrative style, describes the important bits and leaves out the advanced stuff. Highly recommended.


2. Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition. The Lisp book. The style is rather dense, but once you've got the basics, that's just what you want.


3. Common Lisp HyperSpec. As you might suspect, this is the spec. Always useful to know where the spec is.

 

I'd suggest reading the first, skimming the second with dives into areas that you think you might need, and browsing the third as appropriate.

 

As for me, I've got an interesting idea for a utility that I want to write. There's nothing like trying to solve a real problem to fill in the gaps academic exercises like reading a book leave. I'm sure you'll hear more about it here when I'm done.

FlexWiki 2.0 Beta 2 Released

I just posted Beta 2 of FlexWiki 2.0 up on SourceForge. Major differences from Beta 1 include:

 

• SQL Server once again supported as a store. 


• Improved SPAM protection via optional CAPTCHA requirements. 


• Added ability to require HTTPS on a namespace-by-namespace basis. 


• Multiple bug fixes.

 

There's other good stuff in there, too - the release notes detail everything.

 

The major remaining issue is performance: 2.0 Beta 2 is significantly slower than the latest released version of FlexWiki 1.8, although still usable. Performance work is ongoing, and significant improvements are expected before 2.0 is released, but for now production deployment is not recommended. That said, we're running it at http://www.pluralsight.com/wiki because for us the new security features outweigh the slowness. And perf aside, I feel good about the stability of the code, and others have echoed that it seems pretty solid.

 

I'm very pleased by how quickly we've moved from Beta 1 to Beta 2, and even more happy about the fact that developer activity has picked up - Beta 2 sports input not just from me, but from Derek Lakin, John Davidson, and Keith Brown (apologies if I've forgotten anyone). I'd also like to thank all the users that gave us feedback on Beta 1 and the interim builds - we fixed a pretty good number of bugs thanks to their input.

 

Beta 2 is likely to be the last Beta before release. I'm currently working on the last major thing that I think needs to go into a full-up 2.0 release: reimplementing caching. My hope is that I can quickly implement a reasonable story there that will bring us back to FlexWiki 1.8 levels of performance. There will be a few cleanup things to do after that, but really, that's the bulk of the work. I won't be so stupid as to give a timeline for when I think that will happen - even if perf work were easy to estimate there's the fact that I've missed every estimate I've given for this project - but I will say that I'm pretty motivated to get this done. Devoting nearly three years of spare time to something will do that. :)

 

Anyway, download and enjoy, and watch for RC1 in the not-too-distant future!