Common Lisp

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Learning Resources

Books

• Successful Lisp by David Lamkins. The best resource around hands down. He is witty throughout the book and it is a joy to read. It is clear that he has spent much time teaching Common Lisp.
• ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham. The chapter on optimization is indispensible.
• Let Over Lambda by Doug Hoyte. Another witty, fun read. His examples are crystal clear and illuminating considering how abstract macros are.
• Land Of Lisp by Conrad Barski, M.D. Aside from being hilarious it is chock full of real live code exercises to follow along with the author. Brilliant.
• Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seigel. The most popular and best places to begin.
• Learn Lisp The Hard Way by the Toronto Lisp User Group. A nice collection of hands on exercises.
• Lisp Hackers by Vsevolod Dyomkin. An enlightening, well put together collection of interviews of famous Lisp programmers.

Links

• CL Cook Book. A collection of useful snippets for every day things.
• Awesome CL. A hand picked selection of packages organized by purpose.
• QuickDocs. A classy web interface to look up documentation for packages in Quicklisp.
• Lispjobs. A lispy job board.
• The Y Combinator. You may have heard of the company named after this.
• What Made Lisp Different. Fun Lisp propaganda by Paul Graham.
• Paul Graham's Lisp Code. A collection of interesting code made available by Paul Graham. Be sure to look at McCarthy's Original Lisp.
• Worse Is Better. So true and so sad.
• The Lisp Curse. Let's solve this problem.
• Planet Lisp. Stay up-to-date with current Common Lisp events.

Speaking Lisp

The term Programming Language to me insinuates that it can be verbally communicated to other people. For the most part this does not tend to be true. Try this: call up a friend on the phone and have them try to type in a program that you wrote and run it. It is absurdly cumbersome. I have pointed this out before regarding mathematics. How has this obvious fact been overlooked for so long?

Lisp And Java As Compared With Honey Badgers And Venomous Snakes

There is this weird dichotomy where Lisp programmers talk all the trash about Java and Java programmers talk all the trash about Lisp. What is it about these two languages in particular? Maybe it's that they are on opposite ends of the spectrum - Lisp being the epitome of academic derived languages and Java the epitome of corporate derived languages.