Recently in Book Category

The first book I've ordered is Programming in Prolog. This book covers everything I should know about Prolog for my next exam.

Originally published in 1981, this was the first textbook on programming in the Prolog language and is still the definitive introductory text on Prolog. Though many Prolog textbooks have been published since, this one has withstood the test of time because of its comprehensiveness, tutorial approach, and emphasis on general programming applications. Prolog has continued to attract a great deal of interest in the computer science community, and has turned out to be the basis for an important new generation of programming languages and systems for Artificial Intelligence. Since the previous edition of Programming in Prolog, the language has been standardised by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and this book has been updated accordingly. The authors have also introduced some new material, clarified some explanations, corrected a number of minor errors, and removed appendices about Prolog systems that are now obsolete.

This book was available for just 5 EUR (used)!

The second book I ordered is The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming:

The purpose of this book is to teach logic and mathematical reasoning in practice, and to connect logical reasoning with computer programming in Haskell. Haskell emerged in the last decade as a standard for lazy functional programming, a programming style where arguments are evaluated only when the value is actually needed. Haskell is a marvellous demonstration tool for logic and maths because its functional character allows implementations to remain very close to the concepts that get implemented, while the laziness permits smooth handling of infinite data structures.

I gonna start to read those books AFTER finishing my previous book which is still very interesting! :)

I've just ordered a new book (in german language) called "Funktionale Programmierung: Sprachdesign und Programmiertechnik " (in english "Functional programming: Language design and programming techniques"). This book is for people who know already a little bit about functional programming but want to dig deeper a little bit! It is demonstrating lots of stuff using functional programming languages such as Haskell and Opal.

I found a great series of free haskell lectures online at http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/book.html#videos. The referent is going through all the chapters of the book 'Programming Haskell'. The videos are pretty good and atm I am enjoying watching them. You should give them a try as well! I think you don't even need to buy the book in order to understand everything.

Update: I put those videos on my pub FTP server for download: ftp://ftp.buetow.org/pub/OnlineLectures/ProgrammingHaskell/

During Christmas break I read the book "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Second Edition" (by Harald Abelson and Garald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman).

"The book should be read by every self-respecting computer scientist. Because of its clarity, simplicity, and wit, this work is highly recommended to anyone seeking an understanding of the emerging pradigms of computer science"

-- Mitchell Wand, American Scientist

This book handles all the topics using the dialect of Lisp called Scheme. It is impressive how simple a syntax and the interpreter and how powerfull the corresponding language can be. The book is mainly dealing with funcional programming techniques. I should overthink Fype, which is my own language for which I wrote an interpreter for.

I just ordered my next book (for US $1.20 from eBay USA + US $11 shipping). In germany this book costs from ~20 up to ~60 EUR.

Language, Proof and Logic covers topics such as the boolean connectives, formal proof techniques, quantifiers, basic set theory, and induction. Advanced chapters include proofs of soundness and completeness for propositional and predicate logic, as well as an accessible sketch of Godel's first incompleteness theorem. The book is appropriate for a wide range of courses, from first logic courses for undergraduates (philosophy, mathematics, and computer science) to a first graduate logic course.

This kind of logic has been introduced in the first two chapters of my previous AI book. I want to dig deeper :)

While my Real World Haskell book nears completion, I ordered on Amazon "Grundkurs Künstliche Intelligenz: Eine praxisorientierte Einführung" (which is german and says: Basics of Artificial Intelligence: A practic-oriented introduction). This book seems to cover all the material which is taught on the basic AI classes at the universities. Sadly, I did not have any AI class during my university time (I studied informatics). And the book has, as far as I know, only good critics.

My first real program written in Haskell is growing. It is forming valid english sentences.

makeSentences = do
	let pronoun = SgI 
        in print $ (pronounForm pronoun) 
           +++ (futureForm pronoun $ IrregularVerb 
                         "go" "went" "gone") 
           +++ (superlative $ RegularAdjective "fast")
	let pronoun = SgHe 
        in print $ (pronounForm pronoun) 
           +++ (presentForm pronoun $ IrregularVerb 
                         "go" "went" "gone") 
           +++ (comparative $ RegularAdjective "fast")
	let pronoun = PlWe 
        in print $ (pronounForm pronoun) 
           +++ (pastForm pronoun $ RegularVerb "watch") 
           +++ (comparative $ IrregularAdjective 
                         "good" "better" "best")

The output of this small program is as follows:

*Main> makeSentences
"I will go the fastest"
"he goes faster"
"we watched better"

So far the program handles pronouns, regular verbs, irregular verbs, regular adjectives and irregular adjectives with all of their exceptions. The program is less then 200L. Since I am used to C/C++/Perl and Java, programming in Haskell forces me to rethink the way of programming. It's a great experience. I still 've much to learn. And my Real World Haskell book I've only finished half yet :)

The last weeks I started (slowly but constantly) to learn functional programming using Haskell. First, I started with the functional programming practices (available as videos) of the RWTH Aachen (University). However those practices aren't so good if you don't have the lecture itself as well. Afterwards I was reading most of the Yet Another Haskell Tutorial and did most of the practices listed inside. I did this until I found out about the book Real World Haskell, which is also available for free as HTML pages. I decided a hard cover book is much nicer and it is supporting the authors, so I ordered myself a copy of this. While waiting for it, I found a 15 year old book about Informatics in my shelf.

The last ~150 pages teach how to functional program using the Gofer Programming Language. While waiting for Real World Haskell I am reading how to program in Gofer at the moment. Gofer can be seen as a very light version of Haskell. So if I learn Gofer, then I also learn Haskell. Today, Haskell is 100% compatible to Gofer plus more.

One of my long term goals may be reimplementing my AI IRC Bot in Haskell. At the moment, the bot is written in Perl.