Lisp is often thought of as an academic language, but it need not be. This is the first book that introduces Lisp as a language for the real world.
Practical Common Lisp presents a thorough introduction to Common Lisp, providing you with an overall understanding of the language features and how they work.
On Lisp is a comprehensive study of advanced Lisp techniques, with bottom-up programming as the unifying theme. It gives the first complete description of macros and macro applications. The book also covers important subjects related to bottom-up programming, including functional programming, rapid prototyping, interactive development, and embedded languages.
How to understand and use Common Lisp.
Interviews with Common Lisp programmers.
Develop Web applications in Common Lisp.
Find solutions to problems and answers to questions you are likely to encounter when writing real-world applications in Common Lisp. This book covers areas as diverse as web programming, databases, graphical user interfaces, integration with other programming languages, multi-threading, and mobile devices as well as debugging techniques and optimization, to name just a few.
Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!
A comprehensive guide to writing efficient programs with examples in Lisp.
Let Over Lambda is one of the most hardcore computer programming books out there. Starting with the fundamentals, it describes the most advanced features of the most advanced language: COMMON LISP. The point of this book is to expose you to ideas that you might otherwise never be exposed to.
The purpose of this book is to provide a quick introduction to Common Lisp and then provide the user with many fun and useful examples for using Common Lisp. The author has used Common Lisp professionally since 1982..
Look here for a more complete list of books.
If you need help, get in contact via the Lisp mailing lists and IRC.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."
- Abelson & Sussman, SICP, preface to the first edition
"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
- George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture
"One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented."
- Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach
"Lisp is a programmable programming language."
- John Foderaro, CACM, September 1991
"Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material."
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
- Philip Greenspun (Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming)
"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot."
- Eric Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker"
"Lisp is a programmer amplifier."
"Common Lisp, a happy amalgam of the features of previous Lisps."
- Winston & Horn, Lisp
"Lisp doesn't look any deader than usual to me."
"SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing."
"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
"The greatest single programming language ever designed."
- Alan Kay, on Lisp
"I object to doing things that computers can do."
"Lisp is a language for doing what you've been told is impossible."
"Lisp is the red pill."
"Within a couple weeks of learning Lisp I found programming in any other language unbearably constraining."
"Programming in Lisp is like playing with the primordial forces of the universe. It feels like lightning between your fingertips. No other language even feels close."
"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing."
"Lisp is the most sophisticated programming language I know. It is literally decades ahead of the competition . it is not possible (as far as I know) to actually use Lisp seriously before reaching the point of no return."
- Christian Lynbech, Road to Lisp
"[Lisp] has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts."
- Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10
"The limits of my language are the limits of my world."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.6, 1918
