Peter Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (PAIP, for short) currently sits at the top of my reading list. Some readers will have heard of it before now; for those who have not, PAIP is a classic text in practical computer science. It no longer represents the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, but it treats many classic programs in the field, and propounds many generally-applicable programming techniques.
My current interest in PAIP lies in the pedagogical Scheme implementation contained therein. I have -- as I referenced previously -- become interested in programming languages in their own right, but until recently, I knew nothing about their design or implementation. I know more now about the design of a programming language (enough, at least, to admire the simplicity and elegance of R5RS Scheme) but still little of their implementation. That deficiency is now being rectified. I am working through the first interpreter that Norvig presents -- a very simple one, implementing only a skeletal Scheme. Macros and the attendant control structures come next.
Once I have mastered these implementations of Scheme (and there is also a byte-code compiler presented in PAIP!), then -- perhaps -- I can continue on to the wealth of detail contained in Lisp in Small Pieces, and after that, to the Scheme literature; my ultimate goal is to author a modern implementation that compiles to LLVM.
