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This book is well worn, dog eared, and on my home office book shelf. While many people criticize it, for legitimate reasons, it is still a fun and wonderful journey through Common Lisp. I wish more books were written in this irreverent and whimsical style.

If however you want a more traditional and "from zero" introduction to Lisp, then "Common LISP - A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation"[0] may be better. If you already know a little bit of Lisp and want to step up your abilities then "Practical Common Lisp"[1] is probably what you are after.

[0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/

[1] http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

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If you like this sort of thing, here are some others in a similar humorous style for other languages.

1. Kaufman, Roger. A FORTRAN Coloring Book (probably the first funny programming book -- from 1978).

2. Lipovača, Miran. Learn You A Haskell for Great Good.

3. Hebert, Fred. Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good (inspired by the Haskell book).

4. Felleisen, Matthias. Realm of Racket (basically Land of Lisp for Racket. Oddly, nobody's done a "Commonwealth of Clojure" or "Society of Scheme" yet.)

Starting Forth / Thinking Forth from Brodie are great too

They are now freely downloadable: http://www.exemark.com/FORTH/StartingFORTHfromForthWebsitev9... http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/

> nobody's done a "Commonwealth of Clojure"

Higginbotham, Daniel. Clojure for the Brave and True.

https://www.braveclojure.com/

I loved Land of Lisp, but found Clojure for the Brave and True annoying. To me, LoL is hilarious, while CftBaT tries to be funny, but fails.

Hmmm I think I remember a few failed jokes but I found the actual coverage of the language pretty good, wdyt? I guess for a book like this you are not really looking for a comedy best seller, no? :-)

I guess the thing is that when an attempt at humor fails, which is obviously subjective, it starts to distract from the content.

I agree it is subjective. I actually open Clojure for The Brave and True book from now and then just because I find so much of it truly hilarious. The hilarity is what really helped me get Clojure. I also like the Land of Lisp and find it funny as well.

I really loved the part where Lady Gaga explained multitasking.

I suspect this is one of the best books on Clojure out there ("suspect": I'm working through a couple of different ones on and off).

Clojure Applied (Alex Miller) or Programming Clojure 3rd Ed (Alex Miller / Stuart Halloway) would be my picks but I don't know how beginner friendly they are.

They're certainly not as colourful as brave but found the pace and coverage good

Realm of Racket is such a strange book. It feels like they tried really hard to follow LOL or "why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby" aesthetics/structure, with mixed results.

Also, I know this is silly but I remember the book followed this guy who was supposed to be "the hero" that was always sad or concerned, or frowning, in every picture, right on to the end of the book (or so I remember it...). I know it is silly but that put me down :-p

Only from skimming the first few pages of "Why's (poignant) guide to Ruby" I wanted to learn Ruby.

I didn't checked recently, but I found bizarre (maybe not the right word) how the author one day decided to disappear and nuke his Internet presence.

https://poignant.guide/

I love this guide! A friend showed it to me and I still quote lines from it often. I like the bit about "our own recliners", I tell my friend that someday him and I will have our own recliners. Another line I vaguely remember is when he's made a backpack for a bug out of a leaf. I think he puts a skittle and a battery in there and then says "that should last him". The writing style is great.

Yes, that was interesting. I read about it at the time (I was doing Ruby around then). Another one on the same lines was Mark Pilgrim (author of Dive into Python and similarly-named books for Python 3 and HTML 5, IIRC).

Why’s Poignant Guide To Ruby is also in this vein, though a bit weirder.

_why's book is what got me into programming. I still love Ruby, even though I've only had single digit months where I was able to program professionally in it

1+ for “commonwealth of Clojure”—but shouldn’t there be a j somewhere in that? Cjommonwealth? (Pronounce j like y and it kinda works.)

LYAH is a great introduction for Haskell in my opinion. It helps make an intimidating language more approachable. And once you see that it's not all that intimidating, it's easy to find resources for yourself and keep learning Haskell.

The Haskell IRC community is a great resource as well, and probably one of the friendliest around. (#haskell on freenode)

I second the recommendation for Practical Common Lisp, even for complete beginners and newcomers to Lisp. It covers the very basics, and the writing style is accessible and patient.

Lisp has such an amazing literature. Aside from those 2, which are truly nice, there's The Little Schemer, SICP, On Lisp, Lisp in Small Pieces, PAIP and many others (like CLtL, The Art of the MOP, etc).

I personally think Lisp in Small Pieces is really underappreciated.

Is there such a thing as a bad Lisp book? ;) Maybe there are only ones you're not ready for yet... (I've been unsuccessfully searching for a hardcover of Art of the Metaobject Protocol for a while, I can make myself ready for it once I have it.)

In HN tradition where we all recommend every book we've ever read similar to the submitted one (and Land of Lisp is worth reading), an overlooked recently published booklet I found is Common Lisp in the Wild: https://www.darkchestnut.com/book-common-lisp-application-de... Common Lisp is so flexible in letting you develop the way you want to develop, but if you're a professional programmer looking for a Maven-esque template of "structure your project in this familiar way without sacrificing any of the interactive Lisp dev experience, enumerate version-pinned dependencies, one-step make to build, test, run, deploy the final artifact" like I was that book's suggestions are worth the entry fee and you're left with a stable foundation to deviate from.

> is there such a thing as a bad Lisp book?

Yes, there exists a certain a really awful book from the 1980's about making your own Lisp in C, which has recently been reprinted in essentially its original form.

Oh that sounds exciting, what's it called?

It is called Interpreting Lisp by G. Knott.

Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/6qc61v/second_edition...

Not to be confused with other books from the 1980s about doing Lisp in C, like Lisp: A Portable Implementation by S. Hekmatpour.

I nearly started working through that, would you mind sharing why you think it is a bad book? thx

I’m pretty sure it’s because the lisp that book makes isn’t an exact lisp; There are many features lacking and some fundamental concepts are wrongly implemented; However for developing C skills, it’s pretty good. Wouldn’t recommend learning Lisp with that though.

oh you're correct it is meant to develop C skills not learn Lisp

The 900-something lines of C code documented by the book Interpreting Lisp, which can now be found on Github, is not something I would recommend for teaching C beginners.

From a best practices point of view, it is pretty awful.

https://github.com/Apress/interpreting-lisp

> Is there such a thing as a bad Lisp book? ;) Maybe there are only ones you're not ready for yet... (I've been unsuccessfully searching for a hardcover of Art of the Metaobject Protocol for a while, I can make myself ready for it once I have it.)

The Art of the Metaobject Protocol is truely a delightful book. While it is probably not very useful for practical programming - it isn't meant as a teaching book for beginners, it certainly is enlighting how to bootstrap an object oriented system on a common lisp without any object facilities. So if you can get hold of one, grab it!

Personally, I am not a fan of the Keene book. I know, many people here disagree with my view, but I neither like its writing style nor the programming style it presents. I would strongly recommend Practical Common Lisp instead.

> the programming style

There is a lot of programming style to be learned from the Art of the Metaobject Protocol.

Yes, from Amop :) But not from the Keene book.

I'd think from both.

> Is there such a thing as a bad Lisp book?

there are not many really bad ones, but there are some and I'm not going to mention them. ;-)

I'm going through this book now. It has a different style from LoL but I do find it suits me better. It feels at least more structured :)

I do recommend Practical Common Lisp not only for Lisp newcomers. The concepts teached apply to programming in a bigger context. Lisp is here only a vehicle (a very good one).

What are the criticisms of it? Curious.

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