Programming Books

I always start with reading a MCSE for dummies when I am preparing for an exam. This one is the best so far and after taking the exam I can say that this book is all you need.
I used other materials as well because there were some objectives that I did not have experience with.
I scored 790 and that was more than I expected.

I found this book full of information without drowning it's readers in useless jargon. Some of the content was covered only briefly, but with some hands on learning and this book, passing the test was a breaze!

As a Microsoft Instructor, I recommend this book to all of my students. It cuts through the fluff and crud that Microsoft usually tacks on to the courses and gets to the meat and potatoes of what Active Directory is all about. Several students have used this besides my class and have blown the test away. Check out the author's exam tips to save yourself some headaches.

This book does a fantastic job preparing you for the exam 70-217. I am currently an NT 4.0 MCSE aspiring to be a Windows 2000 MCSE and wouldn't of been able to pass this exam with out this book. The author did an wonderful job helping me understand the complex features of Active Directory like group policies and remote install services. Which by the way are hit hard on the exam. I recommend this book to everyone looking to get certified in Windows 2000.

I passed 70-217 today using this book. I scored an 800 and something. This book did a great job of covering the material that MS tests about.

I am very carefull about the books I buy simply because most books just teach you the alphabet again. This one is a rare exception. Very exhaustive coverage and an important reference book in my collection.

If you are experienced in IT governance and processes, this book is a great reference. This is a great tool when combined with other frameworks such as CMM, ITIL, and COBIT.

This book is really good.It gives clear picture of software developement methdologies. I really enjoyed reading this book.This will be my one of the favorite books.

Excelente para el desarrollo de grandes proyectos tanto en Web como de todo tipo de sistemas.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Roger Fournier's book. I am a voracious reader with many books on Client-Server, Web technology, systems development, etc.; however, Mr. Fournier's methodology is a welcome addition to my library. This may be the most practical book that I have seen for systematically approaching the development of complex systems. I plan on incorporating much of his methodology and ideas in my future projects. I would recommend it for anyone interested in learning about client-server or web technology and it is a great reference for professionals involved in project development (both large and small).

I am encouraged by the books honesty in stressing that building large systems is hard work. Too often the literature touts "sure-fire" success if you follow a particular "cook book" sequence or employ specific technology. As anyone in the business knows, good preparation, realistic goals, teamwork and attention to detail are more important than choosing the latest "hot" technology. The book walks through the stages of a projects life cycle and provides much "food for thought" in how to get each stage right. But it never deceives one into thinking the process is easy and it never implies that the proposed methods are the only logical approach to take.

Although the title focuses on C/S and Web Application development, the methodology presented has a much broader application. It provides an excellent framework for development of any complex system. The book is well written. It provides broad coverage from requirements discovery through project deployment. The book contains so much information that the reader may want to focus on specific areas of high personal interest at first- such as Web architecture or systems analysis. Fortunately, Mr. Fournier's style is such that you can concentrate on the chapters that are most relevant to your needs first and later read the other sections without a significant loss of continuity.

As an Enterprise Architect, I have found the book very helpful. It contains useful information for project managers, enterprise and system architects, analysts, developers and test engineers. Without going into details I'll say that the tables, checklists and web-references presented throughout the book have been very useful.

I believe the survey, analysis and joint facilitated session chapters are well presented and offer a lot of information on project definition and scoping. They certainly make clear the importance of up-front planning to a projects success. For my purposes, the C/S and Web Architecture chapter was of high interest and was well presented. I was glad to see a chapter devoted to software re-use. However, I would like to see this chapter expanded to include more information on infrastructure, middleware and components. I would recommend anyone interested in the book to quickly scan the table of contents to see the wide range of information that can be found.

Mr. Fournier mentions that there might be a follow-up book focusing on the project management aspects of building complex systems. I sincerely hope he writes this.

As someone who's been writing code for mod_perl-enabled Apache servers for six years, I can honestly say that this book is one of the best single references on a topic I've seen. Much like the "Perl Cookbook" and "Writing Apache Modules in Perl & C" wrapped into a single volume (with all the recipes tightly focused on mod_perl). I've recommended it to everyone I know who writes for this platform, and it is rarely more than 2-3 feet from my keyboard. Covering the subject as deeply as sub-classing the Apache classes in XS (Perl's layer of glue for writing and linking C code), there's very little about mod_perl you won't find in the book.

Over the last few years mod_perl has become a serious force in web development. If you're building a web site to run on an Apache server and you want to write the code in Perl, then you're going to want to install mod_perl on your server too as it's the best way to avoid many of the performance issues with traditional CGI. It's taken a while for publishers to wake up to the fact, however, and there haven't been many books in the shops. It looks like this will be the year that this changes. A number of mod_perl books are about to be published and this is the first.

This book uses the popular "cookbook" approach, where the content is broken down into short "recipes" each of which addresses a specific problem. There are almost two hundred of these recipes in the book arranged into chapters which discuss particular areas of mod_perl development. In my opinion the cookbook approach works much better in some chapters than in others.

It's the start of the book where the cookbook approach seems most forced. In chapter 1 problems like "You want to compile and build mod_perl from source on a Unix platform" provide slightly awkward introductions to explainations about obtaining and installing mod_perl on various platforms (kudos to the authors for being up-to-date enough to include OS X in list list). All the information you want is there however, so by the end of the chapter you'll have mod_perl up and running.

Chapter 2 looks at configuration options. It tell you how to get your CGI programs running under mod_perl using the Apache::Registry module which simulates a standard CGI environment so that your CGI programs can run almost unchanged. This will give you an immediate performance increase as you no longer have the performance hit of starting up a Perl interpreter each time one of your CGI programs is run. This chapter also addresses issues like caching database connections and using mod_perl as a proxy server.

We then get to part II of the book. In this section we look at the mod_perl API which gives us to the full functionality of Apache. This allows us to write Perl code which is executed at any time during any of the stages of Apache's processing.

Chapter 3 introduces the Apache request object which is at the heart of the API and discusses various ways to get useful information both out of and back into the object. Chapter 4 serves a similar purpose for the Apache server object which contains information about the web server and its configuration.

In chapter 5 the authors look at Uniform Resource Indentifiers (URIs) and discuss many methods for processing them. Chapter 6 moves from the logical world of URIs to the physical world of files. This chapter starts by explaining the Apache::File module before looking at many ways to handle files in mod_perl.

The previous few chapters have built up a useful toolkit of techniques to use in a mod_perl environment, in chapters 7 and 8 we start to pull those techniques together and look in more detail at creating handlers - which are the building blocks of mod_perl applications. Chapter 7 deal with the creation of handlers and chapter 8 looks at how you can interact with them to build a complete application.

Chapter 9 is one of the most useful chapters in the book as it deals with benchmarking and tuning mod_perl applications. It serves as a useful guide to a number of techniques for squeezing the last drops of performance out of your web site. Chapter 10 is a useful introduction to using Object Oriented Perl to create your handlers. Whilst the information is all good, this is, unfortunately, another chapter where the cookbook format seems a little strained.

Part III of the book goes into great detail about the Apache lifecycle. Each chapter looks at a small number of Apache's processing stages and suggests ways that handlers can be used during that stage. This is the widest ranging part of the book and it's full of example code that really demonstrates the power of the Apache API. I'll just mention one particular chapter in this section. Chapter 15 talks about the content generation phrase. This is the phase that creates the actual content that goes back to the user's browser and, as such, is the most important phase of the whole transaction. I was particularly pleased to see that the authors took up most of this chapter looking at methods that separate the actual data from the presentation. They have at recipes that look at all of the commonly used Perl templating systems and a few more recipes cover the generation of output from XML.

Finally, two appendices give a brief reference to mod_perl hooks, build flags and constants and a third gives a good selection of pointers to further resources.

This is the book that mod_perl programmers have been waiting for. The three authors are all well-known experts in the field and it's great that they have shared their knowledge through this book. If you write mod_perl applications, then you really should read this book.

This book has become my favourite and i keep it open by my monitor as i code. It is for those of us who have graduated fron $foo and 'Hello World' examples and need solutions to our everyday coding problems. In short, it has reduced my daily caffeine and nicotine intake.

This book hits the nail on the head. Excellent technical information, much much much more than your typical book that is just regurgitated man(1) pages. Geoff and company delivery a book that shows you the power of mod/perl, why you should use it, and why it is great for what your doing. This book is part of my standard fare.

This book is terrific! We were having problems with mod_perl memory usage and performance with our new website. This book gave us great ideas on how to implement startup.pl scripts, Apache::DBI, and many other Apache parameters. But the biggest payback was in the profiling of our code. The book suggested problem areas (such as slurping files), and provided reference to Apache::DProf which is a beautiful tool for profiling. The end result has been tremendous performance increase. Well worth the price (and even the quick shipping charges), this book is very timely! Kudos to Geoff, Paul and Randy on a robust, selfless and important effort!

I used Dragon to first-draft Writing Nonfiction: Turning Thoughts Into Books. I was so impressed with the system, I included a chapter on using speech recognition to dictate a how-to book. Then I found Dan Newman's book. I recognized a number of things I had learned and found a whole lot more. Newman made the Dragon even more fun.

If you write a lot and are not an accurate, rapid typist, get speech recognition software. If you are fast and correct, keep on keyboarding. Dragon is good but you will have to make corrections. If you already make mistakes, it does not matter if you talk or type.

Dan Newman takes you step-by-step through using Dragon Naturally Speaking. (For coverage, click on Table of Contents in the left-hand column of this page.) He even includes trouble-shooting tips and resources.

Dan Newman is a great writer, gifted computer expert and a dedicated teacher.

As the author of 113 books (including revisions and foreign-language editions) and over 500 magazine articles, I highly recommend this book to anyone who has to write a lot. DanPoynter@ParaPublishing.com.

Why didn't someone write this book years ago? Dan Newman distills the complexities into concise explanations of perfect clarity. Dragonites need this book. All the problems I've been struggling with for years were solved in a few hours of reading. Talk about clear, easy organization. Thank you, Dan Newman!

This book not only covers Dragon NaturallySpeaking software but also offers several tips and examples on efficient speech recognition. The material is presented in such interesting fashion that makes this book fun to read. If you own Dragon NaturallySpeaking software, this book is a must to have.

Dave Newman's book is essential for any speech recognition user regardless of the amount of experience they may have. He teaches you techniques that help you improve your accuracy and speed. He also gives you pointers on how to optimize your software and hardware for maximum accuracy and speed. Dave provides a complete step by step guide on all the features of Dragon 4.0 with greater detail. He includes the new features such as surfing the web by voice. This book is a must have for making your speech recognition program usable in terms of reducing frustration and improving the overall performance of your software with his instructions which Dragon doesn't cover in their manual.

This is a really helpful book. I would prefer to read and Dan Newman's book than all the technical stuff in the Dragon manual, because it is so much more user-friendly. I have been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking since it came out in 1995. There is so much to know, and so much you can forget!! By reading this book, I am remembering some very useful tips, and learning some new ones. I would recommend this book to anyone using NaturallySpeaking.

Excerpt from C# Online.NET Review (wiki.CSharp-Online.NET):
"This book is the authoritative reference to the .NET Framework libraries: Base Class Library (BCL) and Extended Numerics Library. Each type has its own chapter with the following features;

- Header - namespace name, type name, library name.
- Type summary - C# declaration syntax for all members.
- Type description - detailed usage description.
- Annotations - annotations by key Microsoft design team members including Anders Hejlsberg.
- Example - C# source code and program output."

Out of all of the technical books I own, this book is by far one of the best. It covers most of the areas .NET developers will encounter during development. It clearly tells you the information in a easy to understand focused manner.

The other reviewers didn't left too much to say. So I'll remember a credit card TV ad:
SLAR volume 1: $42.89
Shipping & Handling: $12.98
Having BCL authors commenting on types, design decisions, dos and don'ts: priceless.
You can find references about the BCL on innumerous places. For an insiders perspective, SLAR.

Looking for a handy reference for the .NET Framework classes?

If you are looking for a handy reference style book for the .NET Framework BCL (Base Class Library) then look no further. This book is packed to the brim with information, code samples and other goodies. Of coarse you can find this sort of information on MSDN, but wouldn't it be nice to have a well laid out hard-copy on your desk?

This book comes with a couple of really handy tools. First, you get a pretty handy .NET Framework map, which is a pretty large poster that maps out the BCL nicely. Also, you get a really nice CD which includes a .pdf file with almost 4000 pages (it's like a super-detailed version of the book). That's not it - the CD also has a HUGE library of code samples. The CD alone is worth the price in my opinion.

I am very happy with this purchase, I only wish I would have bought it sooner. I am very much looking forward to the next volume!

Having been an avid reader of Brad Abrams blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/brada) for a year and a half, I was eagerly anticipating this book from the moment it was announced; it didn't disappoint. The SLAR provides an extensive description and example of each type, as well as comments from the likes of Anders Hejlsberg, Kit George, Jeffrey Richter and Brad Abrams himself. These comments provide hints and clues into the inner workings of the Base Class Library (BCL) types and why Microsoft chose to implement types in certain ways. This book was an interesting read and like Sean below, I am also left wanting more. However, with Volume 2 on the horizon, I enthusiastically wait...

I bought this book for a class but will definitely keep it afterwards. A lot of well organized information on computer security, from policy to implementation.

This book wasn't required, but suggested for one of my classes. I am so glad that I bought it. I'll be referencing it for years. So much info in it. Why is it so cheap?

Network Security: The Complete Reference is simply an awesome security book.

It has just about everything you need to know when it comes to infosec.

A true bible for network security. Also covered are items on risk management, network security policies etc. The book includes simple to advanced topics on network security

I'm working in Information Security, and I was looking for a good security book, fortunately my decision was the best. This book is very complete and not only explain the concepts of network security but Information Security in the general context. The topics are technical as well as administrative. Explain how the security should be implemented and assessed or audited. I really improved my knowledge and my productivity in my job.

Book is excellent. Covers the theory very well, such that you can make the computer code yourself. They also provide puedocode. You will be able to learn it better than other books that just give you the code. I find that once you understand the theory, writing the code is easy.

Everybody who tries to use NNets for real goes through these steps.
First, there is the Delta rule.
Then, there is overfitting, local minima, generalization problems and frustration.

The complexity of NN is not in it's math; the difficulty is in the construction of a NN. This book is excellent in providing rules-of-thumb for NN construction, while at the same time providing the theoretical backing.

Hey I am not making money reviewing this book, it's just really good.

Many textbooks can help me to understand the different concepts of neural network, but not the practical tips needed to optimize neural network anlysis and implementation.

The topics covered are reminicent to those discussed in part 2 and 3 of the Neural Network FAQ. In chapter 6, the relationships between learning rate, momontum, trainig time and learning modes are presented graphically. With this, it helps me to rule out and avoid learning parameters that are unlikely to improve the NN performance. This is especially important if the dataset is large and the NN program is implemented in Java.

If the aim is to develop a NN solution that will give you the best results, I find both chapter 7 (heuristics for weights initialization) and 16 (heuristics for improving generation) are esential and saves me a lot of time from reading many journals.

In summary, this book has helped me to develop the art of NN optimization. It shows me how to visualize decision surface and the various graphical relationships between learning paramters and various components of NN topology. I think you will find this book very useful after your NN program is up and running and you are looking for ideas and explaination on how to improve the NN performance further.

After owning this book for many years and reaching for it many times, I decided that I at least owed the book a five star review.

Early in my graduate career I began working with neural networks and discovered this book in a electronic bookshelf available at my university. After printing chapter after chapter to read on subway rides home I ended up buying it for convenience. It gave me the background I needed to code up a basic artificial neural network in C++ and to then extend it to fit my needs.

The style of the writing is the perfect balance of enough detail to understand a concept or method without unnecessary wordiness. Each chapter covers an important aspect of neural network development and application - for exmaple, internode weight initilaization techniques - and acts a sort of mini-review of the most popular methods with a clear explanation of the pros and cons of each.

This is an excellent bookshelf addition for anyone who works with neural networks.

Some books just have the right feel about them and this is one of them. The author clearly knows neural networks and also knows how to communicate to others in a no-nonsense fashion. With so many books being published, you rarely find a technical book that is as good as this. The emphasis here is on conveying the insights that the experts in this area would know. Importantly, concepts are explained equally in words, graphics and mathematics, maximising the uptake of knowledge from the book. Tufte would be impressed by the quality of the line graphics in this book, and the information that they convey, not to mention the overall presentation. I suspect that this book would make an ideal textbook for a course in neural networks. Overall, I've enjoyed reading it very much.

As all colleges do, we offer adult evening classes on programs which our advisory board recommends. This semester, we offered our first evening SolidWorks CSWA Certification program. To my surprise, the class was filled in four days with 20 students, some from industry, and some from our engineering program.

I use the SolidWorks CSWA Certification Guide in class. The book is a comprehensive review and practice package for the certification. Every chapter focuses your study and tests your knowledge of the subject through specially designed assessment exercises. What is especially great about this book is that it includes self study sections with the initial and final models.

For anybody starting to prepare for the CSWA exam, this is the book you should be looking at.

Very imformative I learnt something the first time I opened the book, recommend to all.

I've been using Engineering Design with SolidWorks by Planchard and Planchard in my classroom for the past few years. In my opinion, this is one of the finest SolidWorks books on the market today. As an instructor, I can appreciate when an author/s writes a brilliant user friendly book with clear step by step procedures and illustrations to educate the student. This makes my life in the classroom a lot easier....

This fall, my students requested to take the CSWA Certification exam. I had my students purchase this book which we used for the exam preparation. The students enjoyed the book immensely. The book is focused on the exam, by key categories with many examples and exercises. I would not recommend this book for anyone who does not have at least six to eight months of SolidWorks knowledge. The CSWA exam is not an easy exam, but like any industry certification, it provides a tangible measurement to the skill sets of the student in 3D CAD. Well done.

I enjoy the modeling techniques presented in the book which I did not encounter in my Solidworks training; it is always a good practice to learn for any software from different prospective. So this book does not only prepare you to the exam it also teaches you the most effective and smartest modeling techniques.

I pass the exam with 80% mark, but be careful guys, the parts in the exam was NOT easy.

This is a great book for SolidWorks users. I learned many new techniques going though the exersizes. In spite of four years of industrial exprience using SolidWorks, I would have failed the CSWA exam without this book, becasue many of the modleing methods on the test are not used in my industry.

RMAN is the present and the future of Oracle solution for backup.
It has a simple concept, but a great variety of commands, by this way, as a solution for all the complexity inside the RMAN solution, Oracle Database 10g RMAN Backup & Recovery come as a special "friend" to help us discovering all posibilities inside Oracle RMAN software.

I had no idea about backup and recovery but after reading this book and trying out the examples, I can say with confidence I can recover a RMAN backed database. Written extremly well!!! One of the good technical boooks I have read....

We had to install and configure Oracle10g 4 node RAC with ASM+FLASHBACK and implement backup/recovery procedures using RMAN and Veritas Netbackup. This book covers everything I need to know in depth.

I had bought his book on Oracle 9i RMAN Backup and Recovery...
And very much impressed with the technical details and examples given in the book... Same way, the book on 10g also excels in technical depth and details...

Backup and Recovery is one of the most critical tasks that a DBA has to perform. Sadly, it is also one of the most misunderstood. RMAN should be the tool of choice for backup and recovery for Oracle databases. There is so much that can be done with RMAN.

What Robert and Matthew do is break it down piece by piece. There is a great intro and they build on that in subsequent chapters. If you want to link RMAN directly with your backup software (i.e. Veritas, EMC, Legato, etc..) then the authors show you how. I used the Veritas piece to link RMAN in and it worked flawlessly. They go over the latest features including block changing files (for faster incremental backups), merging level 1 and level 0 backups (for faster recoveries without the overhead of backing up the whole database), and even cover what the flash recovery area is and how to use it. There is so much great material packed in this book. Yeah, you can try and read Oracle's docs, but rather than just show you how to do it, the authors also teach you why to do it.

You can read this book chronologically or use it as a reference. The authors writing style make this book a great joy to read. They also include a lot of great examples in case you like to learn by seeing.

I would highly recommend this book if you are an Oracle DBA, whether you use RMAN or not. Afterall, RMAN is what you should be using :).

The strength of this book is its combination of breadth and completeness: there is working code (well beyond the toy stage) of a large number of different AI systems that cover a large subset of what is commonly considered AI.

The programming itself is rather basic, and very straightforward. In many places an advanced programmer would have avoided a global variable, unified code through the use of higher-order functions, had functions communicate through a shared local environment, created a lazy list, you name it.

The author avoids most of these more advanced approaches in order to present the ideas behind the approaches without being sidetracked into programming technique issues, and that is the correct choice for this book. Even as it is, there is already the duplicity of teaching Common Lisp and teaching AI programming.

That being said, the code in general is not bad at all, even though I wouldn't want my students to learn CL programming from it. The author has simply bent down to the level of, a good C programmer, and worked from there. His main intention being to teach AI programming approaches, he has spent much less time to raise the programming level of his audience.

Knowing the author's level of Lisp programming, I can't wait to see a book by his hand on how to use abstraction as an organising principle in programming.

I have no background in computer science or AI, but found myself needing to use Lisp for various creative and artistic purposes. I've spent a lot of money on books relating to Common Lisp, but I wish I had just gotten this one and Touretzky's "Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation." The particular strengths of this book are its detailed discussion of advanced topics, especially optimization, and the practical overview of current and historical AI topics through programming examples. Very clearly written.

This book is equally excellent regardless of whether you wish to regard it as:

a) A historical study of Artificial Intelligence, with USABLE examples of code, or

b) A book presenting techniques for programming in Common Lisp.

As a reference about Common Lisp, it is certainly lacking, but this is no great problem when both the Common Lisp HyperSpec and Steele's book are readily available in electronic form. It provides something more important: SIGNIFICANT examples, and significant discussions on WHY you would use various Lisp idioms, and, fairly often, discussions on HOW pieces of Common Lisp are likely to be implemented. Its discussion of an implementation of the LOOP macro, for instance, provides a very different point of view than the "references" to LOOP. (Contrast too with Graham's books, which largely deprecate the use of LOOP.)

From an AI perspective, it is also very good, providing WORKING SAMPLES for a whole lot of the historically significant AI problems, including Search, PLANNER, symbolic computation, and the likes.

It would be interesting to see parallel works from the following sorts of perspectives:

- The same sorts of AI problems solved using functional languages (e.g. - ML, Haskell), to allow contrasting the use of those more modern languages. Being more "purely functional" has merits; such languages commonly lack macros, which is something of a disadvantage.

- The use of CL to grapple with some other sorts of applications, notably random access to data [e.g. - databases] and rendition of output in HTML/SGML/XML [e.g. - web server].

This book has been called "The best book on programming ever written". I'd have to agree--it is certainly the best that I've ever read.

William Zinsser said, "The essence of writing is rewriting" and the same can be said for writing computer programs. Norvig's book presents this process--how the limitations of a program are overcome by revision and rewriting. What sets Norvig apart as a writer is that, amazingly enough, he can write about debugging (the most dreaded part of computer programming) and make it a fascinating read!

Lisp has been getting a higher profile lately because of essayists like Paul Graham and Philip Greenspun; in particular, Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming which states: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." So, should this book be read as an exhortation to return to Lisp as the preferred programming language?

Paradoxically, I think not. One third of the way through the book, Norvig shows us how to implement Prolog in Lisp. From then on out, most of the AI techniques he presents either directly use Prolog instead of Lisp (such as his excellent discussion of natural language processing using Prolog) or use Prolog as a base to build on (such as his discussions on knowledge representation).

From this we can abstract what I'd like to call Norvig's Corollary to Greenspun's Tenth Law of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated LISP program is going to contain a slow implementation of half of Prolog". I'm leaving out the "ad hoc", "bug-ridden" part of Greenspuns's law, because Norvig's programs are neither. But it is quite remarkable the degree to which, once having absorbed Prolog, Norvig uses Prolog as the basis for further development, rather than Lisp.

Is this a book about Prolog then? Again, no. What is the take-away message? It is this: as our world becomes more and more complex, and as the problems which programmers are facing become more and more complex, we have to program at a higher and higher level.

Norvig does not stop at just embedding Prolog in Lisp. He also shows us how to embed scheme as well. Excellent discussion on the mysterious call/cc function and on continuations.

In a capsule review, it is impossible to really give an overview of a 1,000 page book like this one. But the scope and heft of the volume really needs to be commented on: the programs presented in this book are like basis vectors, the totality of which nearly span the space of programming itself. In no way should this be considered "just an AI book" or "just a LISP book". This book transcends language, time, and subject matter. It is a programmer's book for the ages.

"Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" is one of the best books of computer science that I have ever read. I put it up there in the pantheon with "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". I have found more useful and mind expanding material in these case studies than I have in many other books on computer science. I highly recommend this book to anyone, even if they have never used Lisp.