<story><title>Let over Lambda – Common Lisp Book (2008)</title><url>https://letoverlambda.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>VLM</author><text>Interesting, possibly flawed analogy:  The Build Your Own Lisp book explains how, and the LoL book explains why.  Build your own lisp book is the natural pairing for LoL, despite many people claiming it goes best with Seibel&amp;#x27;s common lisp book or whatever.&lt;p&gt;Seibel&amp;#x27;s book is good, don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong; I just don&amp;#x27;t think its the proper pairing in the sense of culinary arts putting together a plate of well paired books.&lt;p&gt;The common lisp people and the clojure people fight viciously as only siblings can; this will infuriate those in the common lisp tribe but the ideal introductory lisp book in the general sense of the language is probably not Seibel&amp;#x27;s book its probably the comedic Clojure for the Brave and True.  Not aware of anything quite like that, for common lisp.</text></comment>
<story><title>Let over Lambda – Common Lisp Book (2008)</title><url>https://letoverlambda.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eatonphil</author><text>I enjoyed this book. I personally did not find it condescending. Additionally, the implementation of a Forth interpreter in this book is the best introduction to Forth I&amp;#x27;ve seen (even after years spent playing with Forth and reading one or two books on Forth). But I don&amp;#x27;t recommend this book as an introduction to (Common) Lisp.&lt;p&gt;I recommend this order:&lt;p&gt;1. Practical Common Lisp&lt;p&gt;2. On Lisp (kind of a big jump, so maybe check out ANSI Common Lisp)&lt;p&gt;3. Let over Lambda&lt;p&gt;4. Lisp in Small Pieces (especially if you want to implement a Scheme or Common Lisp)&lt;p&gt;With Common Lisp the Language (Guy Steele) and ANSI Common Lisp (Paul Graham) somewhere in the mix.&lt;p&gt;These are all excellent books and must-reads for anyone interested in programming languages and&amp;#x2F;or the Lisp family.</text></comment>