Lisp Notes from a Friend

I received an email from my friend, Chris Johnsen, which has a lot of good Lisp starting places:

You probably already know about On Lisp (which is out of print, and available as a free download, like you mention in your blog entry), but there is also a newer book on Common Lisp that has been getting some good reviews: Practical Common Lisp. It was just recently published, but the author has made arrangements to keep it freely available in a downloadable form, too (though I am sure he would also appreciate sales of the paper copies). PCL is an introductory book that covers most of Common Lisp while working up some practical code/projects.

I have a copy of Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp (which is not out of print, nor available as a free download). It offers a good introduction to Common Lisp. Some of the stuff is a bit more introductory than you really need (since you are an experienced programmer), but, in my experience, it is pretty easy to skip over the generic-programming parts while picking up the stuff that is unique to Common Lisp.

Also, don't forget to download a copy of the Common Lisp HyperSpec. If you are an Emacs user (or feel up to learning enough Emacs for the purpose), SLIME is a popular Common Lisp development environment for Emacs. I am not sure if it is packaged for Unbuntu, but getting it from CVS usually better anyway. SLIME also has some nice commands for pulling up entries in the CLHS while writing code and/or throwing stuff at the REPL.