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Comment by pdelgallego | Hacker News Reader

Have you think about learning how to write your own programming language. It would give you a deep understanding in topics that would make you appreciate other languages.

If you do the exercises till the metacircular evaluator in SICP book it will teach you Lisp and about how to develop a naive lisp-1 interpreter. Its a great exercise.

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I've wanted to read the SICP book, but do you think the book may be too advanced for someone who knows next to nothing about Lisp and functional languages?

I think is ok, if you already know how to program. The SICP book is not the easiest book ever, but is also not that complicate. SICP teach you many things, not only lisp. YOu can also follow the lectures in the MIT open course web[1].

If you dont feel comfortable with the SICP book (many people dont like it), you can start with How to Design Programs(HTDP)[2]. It teach scheme/racket, and is one of the better books to teach programming that I've seen, and the people in the mailing list and irc channel are very friendly.

The good thing is that both of them are free[3], so you can take a look and see if the fit your expectations.

[1] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

[2] http://www.htdp.org/2003-09-26/Book/

[3] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

Thanks for the advice. I'll take a look at both of them and choose the one I'm more comfortable with. Both the books look quite interesting.

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