Prolog Blog

Another free PDF book: Prolog Techniques

Sat, 8 Aug 2009 12:41:00 -0400

Prolog Techniques by Attila Csenki is a recently published Prolog ebook from the free ebook site bookboon.com.

The books on the site are free because they are ad-sponsored. The ads come in the form of half-page full color ads every 3 to 4 pages. Advertisers in the Prolog Techniques book include Oracle, "Careers in British Intelligence" and other UK-based sites aimed mainly at university students. The ads are a bit flashy for an otherwise calm and simple-looking book about Prolog, but after getting used to the idea I was able to read through the book easily, and I occasionally stopped to look at the ads, even though I wasn't in the target audience for them. I hope the bookboon.com site will be able to survive based on this business model; having newly written material on Prolog is kind of exciting. Exciting on the scale of Prolog related things anyway. However, unless an international audience of programmers picks up on these books and thus shifts their collection of advertisers, it looks like their survival will depend on the uptake by students in the UK.

I'll write more about my experiences with this book as I get through it.

XSB 3.2 Released

Sat, 4 Apr 2009 01:00:00 -0400

XSB version 3.2 was recently released. Many improvements and new features have been added, including:

speed improvements
improved ISO Prolog compatibility
better compatibility with another Prolog implementations
a working 64-bit version
improved tabling
and lots more

Check out the 3.2 Release Notes and download the source and try it out. Basic compilation goes like this:

wget http://xsb.sourceforge.net/downloads/XSB.tar.gz
tar zxf XSB.tar.gz
cd XSB/build
./configure
./makexsb

XSB can then be run with:

cd ..
./bin/xsb

Free online book: Artificial Intelligence through Prolog

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:45:00 -0400

Artificial Intelligence through Prolog by Neil C. Rowe is another book made available online, for free, by the author. Unfortunately it is just HTML pages and not a nice PDF, but you can't argue with free.

Now with comments

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:00:00 -0400

The site is now using comments from Disqus. It is really easy to set up, plus you get features like keeping track comments you've left, and automatically knowing your name and other details when posting on a Disqus-enabled site.

Free PDF book: Logic, Programming and Prolog

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 16:25:00 -0400

Today I found this free PDF copy of the book Logic, Programming and Prolog (2nd edition), made available by the authors. The book discusses Prolog with a formal logic perspective and it wastes no time jumping into the logic. It is probably not the best starting point for those interested in Prolog but lacking a formal logic background. I am planning to read this book because although I have a formal logic background, a lot of my Prolog education was not with a formal logic perspective. I'm hoping this book will help connect my education in logic with the knowledge of Prolog to help me write better code.

For those looking to get a lighter introduction to Prolog, there is always the free online version of the excellent Learn Prolog Now!. I first learned Prolog from this website five or six years ago and I highly recommend it.

RSS feed now available

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 04:25:00 -0400

Prolog Blog now has an RSS feed. I've updated the code to include a Prolog templating system extracted from the excellent Prolog Server Pages by Benjamin Johnston. Now that I've got the RSS feed working, I'll be starting the general Prolog posts. As for improving the site itself, my next steps will likely be:

Individual post pages, with comments
That CSS I keep meaning to add

For now, if you'd like to leave a comment, please visit jeff.dallien.net

Prolog Blog launches

Mon, 16 March 2009 01:47:00 -0400

Welcome to Prolog Blog, a site dedicated to Prolog news, tutorials and helping to connect the Prolog community. The site itself is written in Prolog and the source is available on GitHub. Visit the Prolog Blog GitHub repository. The site is very simple for now but will be undergoing constant improvement. An RSS feed is coming soon.

Feedback, links, suggestions for posts or links to your own blog posts you would like to share are welcome. Please email contact@prologblog.com.

For details on the work leading up this point, please see these blog posts from my personal site, jeff.dallien.net:

You can also check out the Prolog code that generated this post. Thanks for visiting.