Free PDF for the Common Lisp edition of my "Practical Semantic Web and Linked Data Applications" book

I have been working on this book on and off for two years and finally finished it recently while on a long vacation. You can get a free PDF on my Open Content web page or if you want to encourage me to write more material on niche topics, you can buy a print copy.

Although this book covers a small market, I believe that the combination of Common Lisp and the AllegroGraph RDF data store is a great combination for developing knowledge intensive software.

Comments

  1. gavenkoa12:57 PM

    Thanks for this interesting book.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Slobodan Blazeski2:19 AM

    Great news Mark. I just bought the e edition and will read it after I finish the land of lisp. The only remark is the authors of lisp books should organize themselves since it was a dry season after let over lambda and now a flood of lisp books.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Kiyu7:32 AM

    Totally unrelated comment: you should change your Facebook "Like" button to the version which accepts comments - this will allow people to get the word out better as likes which have comments are given better presentation in people's feed.

    -Kiyu

    ReplyDelete
  4. Conser6:08 PM

    Hi, Mark. This looks really promising. However, the URL for the sample code in the book (opencontent/lisp_semantic_web_code.zip) doesn't seem to work. Has the URL changed, or is the code no longer available? Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Mark Watson, author and consultant11:37 AM

    Hello Conser, the ZIP file is back on my web site.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Conser10:21 PM

    Got it -- Thank you!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ruby Sinatra web apps with background work threads

In Java-land, I have often used the pattern of writing a servlet with an init() method that starts up one or more background work threads. Then while my web application is handling HTTP requests the background threads can be doing work like fetching RSS feeds for display in the web app, perform periodic maintenance like flushing old data from a database, etc. This is a simple pattern that is robust and easy to implement with a few extra lines of Java code and an extra servlet definition in a web.xml file. In Ruby-land this pattern is even simpler to implement: require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' $sum = 0 Thread.new do # trivial example work thread while true do sleep 0.12 $sum += 1 end end get '/' do "Testing background work thread: sum is #{$sum}" end While the main thread is waiting for HTTP requests the background thread can do any other work. This works fine with Ruby 1.8.7 or any 1.9.*, but I would run this in JRuby for a lon
Read more

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a way,
Read more