The Reasoned Schemer: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/reasoned-schemer Learning more and more about imperative programming, OOP, design patterns, etc is good, but branching out into declarative programming and the functional and logic paradigms will stretch your mind for the better. The great thing, I think, about The Reasoned Schemer is that it tackles a complex topic with almost no prose. The whole book is basically one code example after another, in a Q/A style. "What does this do?" "Here is what it does, and here's why." Rinse and repeat. I think more technical books should try this.
Like in The Reasoned Schemer? https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/reasoned-schemer
See minikanren and The Reasoned Schemer for an embedded (into a host language) logical/relational language that does what you describe. I think there's a lot of value in learning Prolog on its own, but if I were to try and persuade an employer to use the logical/relational paradigm in a project again I'd probably use a minikanren implementation in a language they already utilize. http://minikanren.org/
Check out Datalog the query language used to interact with Datomic, www.learndatalogtoday.org William Byrd & Daniel Friedman wrote a book called the Reasoned Schemer, which walks through the implementation of a Prolog like logic language called MiniKanren, check out a recent presentation they gave where they show quite a few interesting examples and uses, http://2013.flatmap.no/danwill.html I know this is not a definitive answer, but having a look at those resources may highlight some of the areas where logic programming can be very useful.
I believe a prolog-like interpreter is created in the book The Reasoned Schemer. It's on my book shelf but haven't had the time to work through it.
I also highly recommend The Reasoned Schemer as another route to understanding the concepts behind Prolog - you essentially build the heart of a Prolog system in a couple hundred lines of Scheme. The level of density in such a short text as well the ability to work through it without having to sit in front of a computer is invigorating (I've had to reread the first 80 pages or so about 5 times now, of course it might just be that I'm slow ;). It certainly succeeds at showing the beauty of a system that elegantly intertwines FP w/ LP. Oleg (of Haskell fame) has some excellent further…
Besides The Reasoned Schemer, another excellent logic programming book is _The Art of Prolog_ by Sterling and Shapiro. While it uses Prolog rather than Lisp, it's overall focus is more on Logic Programming than Prolog specifically. It starts with the big ideas in Logic Programming and what they're theoretically capable of, and then shifts to Prolog, the most mainstream implementation of an LP language, and the design trade-offs it has made. (There are other great books more specific to Prolog, if you find you like it.) Also, it has been out of print for a while, and the second edition can be…
Strongly seconded - I started with The Art of Prolog a few months ago and also enjoyed it. Having seen both, I think I'll probably go through the Reasoned Schemer and then return to the Art of Prolog.
K, upvoted simply for mentioning The Reasoned Schemer, a book that I'm having great fun simply picking up occasionally. Time to really start cranking on it.
The Reasoned Schemer sounds like it was part of a series, is that right? I remember reading about The Little Schemer and maybe The Seasoned Schemer. Are those all parts of the same series? Haven't read any of them yet, but hope to do so some day. I like reading the classics of the field. Not only because they are classics, but also because they tend be well-written and hence more readable as well (than your average text). But maybe that is a tautology :) - they are classics because they are well-written ... Update: Answering my own question - I saw…