For those who haven't heard about the book yet: it is a practical description of the main data structures and algorithms in use today. The book is also featuring a presentation of the most important algorithm development techniques, as well a examples of the real-world use cases in each chapter. It uses Common Lisp as an implementation language, and also contains a crash course into the language if you are not yet familiar with it.
I bought myself a copy of your book recently. I have not worked through it back to back, but I enjoyed taking a look at known things through the lens of CL.
However I have to admit that the reliance on additional external libraries kind of had me a bit disappointed, but I can understand the reasoning and advantages behind such a decision.
Is the goal of this book to teach algorithms to Lisp programmers, or to teach algorithms using Lisp as its a good pedagogical language, or something else?
Bought it yesterday when reading this and read it halfway now; I like it. And thanks for taking the effort writing it!
As for remarks;
I second the reliance on the additional libraries; I think most readers are in fact, as you say in the book, purist... And won't like his reliance. No matter if it makes things better or not.
To that point; I personally like your opinionatedness in the book; on HN (etc) you would be shot down for many remarks you make in the book, but I like them here from people and do like that about the writing.
I wouldn't put smileys :) in a book like this, but that's a matter of taste.
And maybe a proofread by a native English speaker could have been good, but nothing was bad per se, it's just, having worked for 5 years in Ukraine (Lviv/Kyiv), that I recognize the way sentences are constructed and that is sometimes not the most readable in English. But I am not native English, and, again, for this kind of book, it's definitely fine, it would just be a bit of icing on the cake.
Thanks for the feedback! I recognize the deficiencies of my English writing. Moreover, the current state of the book is, in fact, much-much better than the original manuscript thanks to the efforts of Dr. Robert Strandh, phoe, and Apress proofreaders. As for the residual ugliness -
c'est la vie...
It's great work anyway! The main point is the technical content; kudos for that! And of course persisting to write it to the very end instead of quitting like most of us do.
In the preface, I discuss a bit the topic of how algorithms are taught in the universities versus how they are actually used. I made a choice to lean heavily towards the "practical" approach. So, from the perspective of a student, this shouldn't be your principal manual, the theory isn't presented in the best possible way, to say the least. (As a manual I'd recommend Skiena, or you can use Cormen etc.) But if you read the book as supplementary material it can give you a different perspective on those theoretical concepts and, hopefully, you'll get more value from studying them as you'll see where it all leads and how you might be using the obtained knowledge in your further work.
As for Lisp, I don't think that picking it for any smart student should be a problem.
You're quite right that SICP is about the fundamentals. Progalgs is about writing efficient programs. It's for those who already understand the fundamentals.
For those who haven't heard about the book yet: it is a practical description of the main data structures and algorithms in use today. The book is also featuring a presentation of the most important algorithm development techniques, as well a examples of the real-world use cases in each chapter. It uses Common Lisp as an implementation language, and also contains a crash course into the language if you are not yet familiar with it.
For those who have already seen or even read the previous version published on Leanpub, here is a summary of the updates: http://lisp-univ-etc.blogspot.com/2021/02/programming-algori...
As usual, AMA.