@Joe - I don't think it's a very good idea trying to learn both APL and J at the same time. But if you must, you must.
And as for Gilman & Rose... good in its time (1970s?) Have you thought of starting with the APL of one of the major vendors, like Dyalog? They've put 2 decades' of effort into an IDE that's crammed with features to make life easy for beginners. Without it you'll waste a lot of valuable time to absolutely no gain, unless you're an advanced student of human frailty. You can download a free copy here: http://www.dyalog.com/unregistered/unreg.html More to the point, all the manuals are downloadable as free PDFs. Go to Lulu.com and type into the Search Lulu Bookstore box down at the bottom, the single word: dyalog IanClark On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 3:52 AM, Don Kelly <d...@shaw.ca> wrote: > Often the one-liners are impressive but there is a problem in that > sometimes they become incomprehensible-needing several lines of comment to > explain. > However APL (and J) does provide for explicit programs which can call on > other programs as subroutines (i.e verbs that are not primiitve(witness, in > J, mean=+/%# -which is actually tighter and yet as clear as in APL and a > hell of a lot more so than in C, Fortran, etc) if that is the way one wants > to go- often not needed as such--. without having to write all the > overhead stuff. As mentioned by Raul , > Gilman and Rose is excellent and in dealing with particular primitives has > lots of "foo " programs. A key thing is reading from right to left and the > natural use of arrays. As Henry implies, you end up thinking of the > problem, rather than the programming. overhead. It is also easy to > experiment with ideas to see what works ---Immediately!! > > Don Kelly > > I went googling for some deeper material on how to think like an APL >> programmer. I have read/skimmed through a good set of the material on >> http://jsoftware.com/papers/ and have skimmed through many of the >> books listed on http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Books. >> >> Are there any specific recommendations, free or for purchase? Or, >> perhaps I should spend more time with the list above. >> >> I found this, The APL Idiom List by Perlis and Rugaber, which looks >> similar to what I'm looking for: >> http://archive.vector.org.uk/resource/yaleidioms.pdf. >> >> The review of this book looks like what I'm after, >> http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-APL-programming- >> Clark-Wiedmann/dp/0884050262, >> constructing useful programs and going into more depth. >> >> Or something of the style of The Little Schemer, >> http://scottn.us/downloads/The_Little_Schemer.pdf >> >> I searched the forum and had trouble finding a relevant post >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm >> >> > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
