I've lightly skimmed this book in the past and got an impression that it is a collection of intros to bunch of subjects. For those who read it thoroughly - do you think this book is useful for experienced devs who are aware/knowledgeable (from other sources) in most (or all) of the subjects mentioned? Or maybe this book is aimed for more beginners, e.g. as a second book after SICP or similar?
I had the same impression when it first came out and I dipped into it in the bookstore a couple times: it looked like a good treatment of a bunch of topics I'd mostly already been introduced to.
This misses what I found most valuable when I did get around to it. There's another thread up on HN right now, "Nobody's just reading your code". Back then I read a lot of code from books, and read more actively by treating it like a reviewer: how could this code be clearer or otherwise better, how else might you do it? Most of the time, in many other books, you wouldn't get far before seeing some clear improvement. In PAIP this basically never happened. Often enough I would think of something, but if you worked it out in detail there was some less-obvious reason the code was the way it was. At one point I spotted a bug, and he wrote back that it'd been a year since the last bug report, and he'd started to hope there weren't any more.
All the code in the book is pretty short, and it's not really "production code", but it's enough to be an education in craftsmanship at every level. I found that more interesting than the object-level topics, though they're worth learning about too.
One more personal reaction I had to this book: feeling like here was someone else with some of the same values. (Only, you know, smarter.) Someone with a similar taste, who couldn't resist coming back to their code repeatedly well after it's "done". The work in the end looks pragmatic, but sort of an idealized pragmatism: you have to really want to produce your best work, to work that hard over it.
He cowrote a Scheme interpreter in Java -- you can find it on his webpage. There are some projects from others on implementing algorithms from AIMA in other languages, such as this one that just came up in my feed the other day: https://github.com/MrDupin/aima-go
I've read most of it, and I think it's a great book for experienced developers looking to dive deep into a pretty specific range of topics. As a beginner's second book after SICP, I'd still recommend it, because it assumes almost nothing. Having read it, I find it hard to see it as just a collection of intros, because you get a lot of mental algorithmic mileage out of e.g. hand-rolling an implementation of automatic differentiation, which is done in the book. You get a lot of clarity on things that are still quite useful.
Peter goes through various iterations improving the approaches in the book. There is a bunch of stuff - like writing good and efficient Lisp code - which is not covered that well in many other books.
