The Genius Of Lisp

The Genius Of Lisp

Cees de Groot has put together a masterpiece of scholarship.

— Richard P. Gabriel

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“The Genius Of Lisp” is a book published by Berksoft Publications on the history of arguably the most powerful programming language in the history of computing.

Here is some background by the author, Cees de Groot (that’s me! ;-)).

This page is the jumping board for content that complements the book.

If you want to read a sample, Amazon has got you covered with their standard preview of frontmatter up and including the introductory chapter. If you want a full chapter, here is chapter 8 in PDF format.

Where to buy

We’re still working on extending the book’s reach, but here is an up-to-date list of places where you can buy. Our preference for the digital edition is the DRM-Free PDF, it gives the best reading experience, and for the soft cover Lulu.com - it’s a Certified B Corp, great people, and of course buying there will maximize our share of what you pay :-). If you want a hardcover, Amazon currently is the only one that sells that version.

Feedback

You can find me on Mastodon and Lemmy. There are various announcement topics: Hacker News, LinkedIn, and Reddit, which I’ll scour for feedback as well. Finally, you can use Libera Chat and join the book’s IRC channel, ##geniusoflispbook to drop me a note. If you’re not setup for IRC, you can use Libera’s web client.

“Praise in public, criticize in private”, that is something nobody every said about books. On the contrary, it’s usually the opposite ;-). Regardless, the book pages on Amazon and other resellers and the book’s page on Goodreads will be happy to receive your honest opinions. All I can do is sit back and hope they’ll be positive ones.

Source code

tar is available on Linux and macOS by default; on Windows you can use 7-Zip to extract, among others.

You can download a tar file with the source code used in the book.

Linkable bibliography

Here is a simple rendition of the book’s bibliography with clickable URLs.

Errata

Nobody is perfect, so we will collect and publish errata here.