Practical Common Lisp Reviews and details

Social recommendations and mentions

• Steel – An embedded scheme interpreter in Rust

  Not exactly what you asked for but, if you have time, I would recommend looking at Practical Common Lisp: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ And also this blog post (which is a much smaller time commitment): https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2020-12-18-repl-driven/. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

• Common Lisp: An Interactive Approach (1992) [pdf]

  If someone is considering learning CL effectively, take this piece of advice: use Emacs. You might think that it's an outdated piece of shit, maybe you hate RMS with a passion or whatever. But make yourself a favour and use it at least for the month that will take you to go through a manual like this or Practical Common Lisp or several others. Just install SBCL, QuickLisp, Emacs and SLIME (or Sly, that is a more... - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago

• Code Is Not Literature

  And Practical Common Lisp, another popular one on HN. The domain name took me by surprised and I struggled to remember why it seemed so familiar; it turns out that PCL can be found in its entirety here, and I had used it years ago to learn CL: https://gigamonkeys.com/book. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago

• Video: Practical Common Lisp. Peter Seibel Google Talk

  The book is great too. You can read it online at https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ Even if you will never use Commin Lisp in production it will teach you new tricks and nee ways to thing about software development. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago

• Adventures in the Land of Lisp

  I'd say use SBCL (which is a Common Lisp implementation) is the canoncial choice for beginners. And then read through Practical Common Lisp to get a nice tour of many of CL's features (including the REPL, macros, conditions, object system+multiple dispatch...) while building an actual non-trivial application from the ground up. It definitely blew my mind. Source: 10 months ago

• Why Lisp Syntax Works

  > Is there a recommended "intro to understanding lisp" resource out there for someone like myself to dive in to? Practical Common Lisp - https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ Casting SPELs in Lisp - http://www.lisperati.com/casting.html. - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago

• yet another super noob question please forgive me

  Clojure is my main language, so my resource is limited, but I particularly enjoyed working through Practical Common Lisp: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. Source: 11 months ago

• A few newbie questions about lisp

  Q4: Read https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. Each chapter should take less than an hour, and it's filled with "useful" things to do, if you don't mind pretending to be in 2005 for a while (I don't think there's a technical book whose example projects have aged precisely as poorly as Practical Common Lisp anywhere after 1980, but they are real world tasks). Source: 11 months ago

• How to Understand and Use Common Lisp

  Also Practical Common Lisp: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago

• I want to learn how to create structures and/or closures for emacs-lisp configuration

  The general attitude and style are unfortunately incredibly arrogant and dogmatic. However, chapter 2, closures, should be the best introduction into closures in Lisp I have seen. Generally "On Lisp" is recommended to read before you go over to "Let over Lambda". There are other books that might be more advisable before you jump into "Let over Lambda", for example Pieter Siebels Practical Common Lisp or Norvigs... Source: 11 months ago

• Beginners help: difference between "let" "setq" and "defvar"

  As a lisp beginner I found Practical Common Lisp a good source (there is a free version on line). I also found the racket language a beginner friendly way to start with a lisp language. Source: about 1 year ago

• Good short documentation for CL functions (etc.) available?

  For more beginner-friendly, I suggest P. Siebels Practical Common Lisp or The CL Cookbook. Both of those should be available in Emacs info format! If authors are lurking in here :-). Source: about 1 year ago

• Tour of Functional Programming?

  I think Common Lisp is a good option. There's other versions of lisp out there (I personally like Racket a lot, Scheme is also popular), but my first exposure to Lisp was through the book Practical Common Lisp (free online) and it blew my mind. It was a lot of fun working through the examples and getting kind of an unadulterated classic lisp experience. I learned Racket later and I like it better as a language,... Source: over 1 year ago

• Gentoo and Emacs, a match made in heaven!

  I remember casually reading this book on common lisp: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. Source: over 1 year ago

• A Few Examples of Lisp Code Typography

  For Common Lisp, there are several free books available: - Practical Common Lisp (aimed at people who know how to program in a more mainstream language already) [1] - Paradigms in Artificial Intelligence Programming (my personal favorite) [2] - Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation (aimed at absolute beginners of programming) [3] I highly recommend the r/lisp reddit community. Reddit as a... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• Pattern Matching and Tail Recursion in Emacs Lisp

  I wouldn't call this everyday Lisp code for beginners. Try Practical Common Lisp: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• Lisp

  NGL, while I don't use LISP--- LEARNING it should be mandatory. It's one of those things that may expand your mind. Specifically, I just worked my way through Practical Common Lisp. It was lovely. Never touched the stuff since, but it changed the way I think about code. Source: over 1 year ago

• I am concerned I am too lazy to be a professional programmer

  Another thing I would like to tell you so you wont get discouraged to soon: programming is difficult, but I believe anybody can learn it. I would also like to recommend the book practical common lisp, it is free here: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ It takes the reader on a tour through the language while also allowing for experimentation on the REPL. Source: over 1 year ago

• Advice for peeking into the Lisp family (CL vs Scheme vs Racket...)

  To that end, there's the freely-available book "Practical Common Lisp" has a couple of nice chapters on macros. More complex discussions can be found in the relevant chapters of "On Lisp", and in "Let Over Lambda". Source: over 1 year ago

• Trying to Understand Lists Better in Common_Lisp

  I have been reading over *"Practical Common Lisp" and when learning about lists I wanted to try and learn how to do some things that I often did in C and Python. One of the things I do quite a lot is use a multidemsional array to handle looping for sets of data. For example, lets say that I was writing a very small quick program and wanted to save a few fruits and some information about them. For this I might do... Source: over 1 year ago

• Haskell for Lisp/Scheme progammers

  Well, (the first few chapters of) SICP broadly is an introduction to LISP-like languages. The portion on tail-recursion was truly illuminating, truthfully, coming from imperetive programming. I would suggest doing the exercises over reading the first couple of chapters, but after that, it's much more general in terms of the matter that is covered. If you really want to learn Lisp, I would suggest Pracical Common... Source: over 1 year ago