Excellent Free Tutorials to Learn Prolog

Last Updated on June 23, 2023

Prolog is a general purpose, declarative, logic programming language, often associated with artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, intelligent database retrieval, and problem solving. It’s widely used in research and education for natural language processing.

Automatic backtracking is one of the most characteristic features of Prolog. It’s a form of searching, fundamental to all artificial intelligence techniques. Prolog also supports multi-directional reasoning; arguments to a procedure can freely be designated inputs and outputs in different ways in different procedure calls. This is a powerful theorem-proving technique. Another key feature of Prolog is that its syntax and semantics are closer to formal logic than say Lisp.

Prolog is generally regarded as a difficult language to get to grips with. But learning the fundamentals of Prolog is definitely worthwhile.

Here’s our recommended tutorials to learn Prolog. If you’re looking for free Prolog programming books, check here.

1. Coding Guidelines for Prolog by Michael A. Covington, Roberto Bagnara, Richard A. O’Keefe, Jan Wielemaker, and Simon Price

Coding Guidelines for Prolog provides immediate guidelines for code layout, naming conventions, documentation, proper use of Prolog features, program development, debugging and testing.

Read the paper

2. A Concise Introduction to Prolog by David Matuszek

Prolog is a logic language, not an algorithmic language, and one therefore has to learn to think about programs in a somewhat different way. The terminology is also somewhat different.

Read the tutorial

3. Introduction to Prolog for Mathematicians by Jocelyn Ireson-Ireson-Paine

Examples include: A circuit simulator, sets implemented as unions of intervals, arbitrary precision rational arithmetic, very simple version of Bundy’s Press, family relationships, example of manual program transformation, demonstration of Prolog inference, symbolic differentiation, and uncertain reasoning.

Read the tutorial

4. Prolog Problems by Werner Hett

The purpose of this problem collection is to give you the opportunity to practice your skills in logic programming. Your goal should be to find the most elegant solution of the given problems. Efficiency is important, but logical clarity is even more crucial. Some of the (easy) problems can be trivially solved using built-in predicates. However, in these cases, you learn more if you try to find your own solution.

Read the problem collection

5. A Short Tutorial on Prolog by Tamsin Treasure-Jones

This tutorial introduces some of the central concepts of Prolog under a series of topic headings.

Read the tutorial

All tutorials in this series: