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Comment by Chris911 | Hacker News Reader

What is a good resource to learn Lisp for an advanced (non Lisp) programmer? Most guides for most languages only cover declaration, simple functions and tiny applications. I want something that quickly goes through the basics and skips to advanced uses in bigger codebases.

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Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel:

http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

PCL is a good book but too wordy for my taste.

Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp will get an advanced programmer up to an advanced level more quickly and efficiently.

http://www.paulgraham.com/acl.html

I'd say both are essential, but PCL should be digested first (no need to read every paragraph). On Lisp is IMHO a lambda power user guide and not a good general introduction to CL.

Note that I recommended the book "ANSI Common Lisp" for an advanced (non Lisp) programmer, not "On Lisp".

That aside, I agree with your description of On Lisp.

I'll second PCL. It really is incredibly good. Unlike some other introductions to Lisp, which tend to be of the algorithmic, CS side of things, PCL approaches things from more of a scripting/software-development side.

Common Lisp really is a great developer's language, and PCL helps show why. Peter Seibel's a great writer, too.

Also, recently published, Clojure for the Brave and True: http://www.nostarch.com/clojure or http://www.braveclojure.com/

I also recommend this book/website. The pacing is good and it gets into some of the really nice parts of Clojure, such as handling concurrency, with clear explanations. Heck, it even has a small intro to Java so you can interact with the enemy to some degree. ;)

A more interesting and unusual section of the book is the intro to using Emacs with Clojure -- it's not necessary to use Emacs, but you will learn how to edit all those parentheses without worrying about editing parentheses. Even if you don't use Emacs, this feature (paredit) is available for many editors and IDEs, so it's worth checking out.

I'd suggest going trough learn-common-lisp-in-y-minutes (1) just to get an idea about the syntax, read On Lisp (2) and Practical Common Lisp (3) and just starting using it to build stuff.

On Lisp by pg explains very well what lisp is all about in the first few chapters.

1: http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/common-lisp/

2: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

3: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

For Common Lisp there are two very good books: Practical Common Lisp (available for free on the web[1]) and Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (PAIP). For scheme, there's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs[2] although it misses some topics like macros.

[1] http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ [2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

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