Ask HN: I want to start learning Lisp. Where do I begin?
There are obviously many possible paths, so I can only really tell you what I&#x27;ve done. I can&#x27;t say it&#x27;s necessarily the <i>best</i> approach.<p>For me, I decided to start with Common Lisp. I installed SBCL, Slime for Emacs, and started working through the book <i>Practical Common Lisp</i>. By and large this seems to be a workable approach, but I will offer up this caveat. The PCL book is very much &quot;project based&quot; in that the author walks you through building a couple of actual applications. This is a Good Thing™ for the most part, but it does mean that you don&#x27;t necessarily get things in the order you might expect.<p>There&#x27;s a part of me that almost wishes I&#x27;d started with a book that takes more of an approach of &quot;programming is ultimately sequence, selection and iteration. Here&#x27;s how you do sequence in Lisp. Here&#x27;s how you do selection. Here&#x27;s how you do iteration. Now here&#x27;s all the Fancy Lisp Stuff™&quot;.<p>The reason I say that, is because if you have at least the primitives for sequence, selection, and iteration (and maybe some I&#x2F;O) in your mental toolbox, you can start building more or less arbitrary programs. With the PCL book structure you don&#x27;t get to, for example, iteration, until moderately deep into the book. You <i>do</i> get there of course, but the early parts left me with an uneasy feeling like &quot;geez, I don&#x27;t even know how to write a loop in this language yet, when am I ever going to be able to just start coding in Lisp on my own?&quot; if that makes sense.<p>Possibly one could complement PCL with another book, or online materials, but so far I&#x27;ve mostly just been grinding through PCL and haven&#x27;t looked at any other Lisp books.<p>HTH.