Common Lisp - A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation

Given I’ve passed through SICP once, quickly grasping common lisp to build stuff and explore the traditional and industrial aspects of lisp (I know clojure exists but traditional…) was my next objective: with decent speed and only solving the somewhat involved exercises, it took me two weeks to complete this book.

The exercises aren’t meant to be a challenge but to adapt to the environment and the topics introduced. The book does not explore concepts with depth (CLOS, macros, etc…) but that shouldn’t be the objective of an introduction anyway.

This is a good stepping stone to get started with common-lisp if you’ve already dipped your toes into a scheme (I did SICP with Racket). When picking this up as your first experience with lisp, I’ll recommend completing all the exercises and not skimming as I did.

On that note, the next book that I’m tackling is “Practical Common Lisp”. I do maintain active notes of anything that I learn, on my braindump and a quick search in the index should highlight all the technical details.

A free distribution released in the public domain can be found here.