A Review of ``Practical Common Lisp'' by Peter Seibel

Information concerning this work may be found here: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book

This is the first Common Lisp book I don't recommend reading.  Having read many others, I saw little
this added.  The book is split into thirty-two chapters, themselves split between demonstrations and
explanations.  I must wonder whether reading it over the WWW may have coloured my perceptions of it.

I find the book fails at being a better introduction to Common Lisp than others, and its examples of
practical programs are also insufficient; as an analogy, it's a machine code book which explains how
numerical bases work with more than an aside.  The Common Lisp code demonstrated has a great deal of
repetition and other nitpicks; he doesn't define a very specialized language for the problem domain,
until the antepenultimate chapter.  The code doesn't meet the high standards which I set for myself.

In the eighth chapter, concerning macros, I was surprised to again come across ``The Story of Mac: A
Just-So Story''; this is a suitable introduction to macro concepts.  While this chapter does mention
some nihilistic sophistry I've rebutted, I don't believe the chapter is entirely tainted, due to it.

In sum, this book isn't strictly poor, but certainly is compared to the many other Common Lisp books
available.  I recommend every other Common Lisp book I've reviewed over it, even though it's gratis.