Ask HN: What books can I use to help teach my girlfriend Lisp?

6 pointsrandombit2 comments

My girlfriend has been working through the Little Lisper, and I try to answer her questions but she is getting somewhat frustrated by the low content style of Little Lisper. Can HN recommend texts for learning Lisp as a first language?

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There are some good beginner books on Lisp, and there have been several discussions before. Two books come to my mind, PCL and "Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation", both for the Lisp beginner. I have read most of PCL and really liked it. I have just begun to read Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation and so far, am really liking it. Both are freely available on the net, so you have nothing to lose to try them out.

PCL - http://gigamonkeys.com/book/ Gentle Intro to Sym Comp - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/index.html

Reference links -

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125766

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/how-to-learn-lisp/

Hope this helps. Good luck!

SICP is a good introduction book. It is fairly deep too. The goal of little lisper is to make you understand recursion. If she gets that then she can get into SICP.

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