If you already know a lisp such as scheme, much of it should already be familiar to you. You can program in a lisp-1/scheme like way using square brackets, and a lisp-2/common lisp way using round brackets. The thing that really makes txr lisp different is the pattern language DSL, and that was what motivated me to learn it because I had a specific use case (processing my personal bank statements). The manpage is huge due to the large amount of builtin functions and features to make up for the lack of external libraries, but there is a lot of overlap with other lisps. I learnt by reading the manpage, looking at examples on stackoverflow and rosetta stone, and playing around with it in the REPL. The pattern matching language takes some getting used to, and it helps to have a good understanding of what its doing under the hood, otherwise you can get very frustrated. Also it uses non-standard regular expressions which lack features such as repetition operators and capture groups, but you can work around this (e.g. by using the pattern language). I recommend finding some non-time-critical use case to motivate you, and work on it in your spare time. Learn how to use the txr repl & command syntax, and create a directory containing some example text files to quickly test things and get a better understanding of how it works. Also create a file for keeping notes about txr & its quirks which you can easily refer to.