... but I would hardly put On Lisp in the same "gentle" category as Touretzky's book. A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation could easily be someone's first ever programming book. Show me the person whose introduction to programming was On Lisp and I will show you either someone who got fed up real quick, or someone who is a whole lot smarter than me and the coders I know.<p>I would probably recommend this order:<p>1. Gentle Intro<p>2. Practical Common Lisp<p>3. On Lisp