Writing a Common Lisp book
I'm writing a programming book on Common Lisp and inviting beta readers to join me!
Common Lisp is one of, if not the favourite programming language of mine. It is a standardised programming language, with multiple implementations1, and it runs almost everywhere.
It is very powerful and expressive, allowing you to do things that take much more code in other programming languages, and often in a more elegant way. The implementations also focus on interactivity, allowing you to make changes to code and see results immediately (This is not a feature in most languages).
It is not that popular lately, which might be because of lack of marketing by large organisations (Go and Rust) and no killer appplications (like the machine learning ecosystem of Python, or statistics for R). There is also the fact that Lisp used to be tightly linked with AI research, and got crushed during an AI Winter.
I'd love it if more people got to learn about Common Lisp and use it. This is not entirely unselfish as the more people use it, the more usable it becomes due to libraries and code examples (and maybe even job roles??).
So, here it is: I’m writing a programming education book using Common Lisp as the language of teaching. I am writing it using mdBook, which the Rust Book is written in, and will be publishing it online at https://drewsh.com/lisp-book. At the time of publication that URL hosts a version not written in mdBook. If any of my readers are interested they could be beta readers!
As for making money from it, it will probably be available online for free, with an option to purchase a PDF/ePub or dead-tree2 copy (this would require it to take off though).
New posts on the blog:
- Small server in python without dependencies: Code example for writing an http server in python with built-ins for testing small ideas quickly.