[rgrmrts]

On a somewhat related aside, the book Land of Lisp [1] is an interesting introduction to both Common Lisp and game programming. If anyone, like me, was interested in learning Common Lisp through a casual and fun mode, I highly recommend the book.

[1] http://landoflisp.com/

[blacktriangle]

I generally recommend people avoid Land of Lisp as an introduction to CL book. It's simultainisouly too easy and too hard for most people approaching the language in that it goes way too briefly over core concepts then all of a sudden shifts gears into much more involved programming.

That being said, it's probably the best second book on CL ever. It showcases a variety of lisp techniques on some very real and fun example projects working itself all the way up to a web base game rendered via SVG which is quite fun.

[rgrmrts]

Fair enough! I haven’t gone through it entirely. What do you recommend as primary texts? I have a few in mind (Practical Common Lisp, for example) but haven’t actually touched them yet.

[blacktriangle]

Practical Common Lisp lives up to its name as the most practical of introduction texts, covering all the core topics and including many small example projects.

Touretzky's Gentle Introduction is popular, but targeted more at people entirely new to programming. The nice thing about this book is it is more like a college textbook in that it has many homework questions with answers in the back, so its great for structured practice.

Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp is still my favorite introductory text assuming the reader has knowledge of an existing functional language (using Javascript functionally for example). The books is a firehose of information, is short yet somehow manages to cover even more material than the other books, includes a full reference to CL, has a section on performance tuning I haven't seen in other intro texts, and still fits in meaty examples like a raytracer and a prolog-lite DSL. It's a real shame this book does not get a reprint, you'll need to buy a used version to get it at a decent price, however I'm finding myself using it as a reference so much I'm considering buying a new copy.

What I've found with learning CL as opposed to other langauges is that I get a lot of value out of reading multiple beginner texts. Rather than having a small number of core concepts like an OO language, CL just has a massive number of functions. This makes it nicer to work with IMO but just takes more repetition to learn.

An alternative approach I would love to see somebody try is to learn straight from Norvig's Paradigms of AI Programming. The book has a brief introduction to the langauge at the start, then goes into writing actual very interesting code, then ends with a section covering some of the more detailed topics. If you're the kind of person who learns most by example of real-world code, it could work.

[fn-mote]

I liked Practical Common Lisp. Also Paul Graham's "On Lisp" (Chapter 4 is a good example of the flavor of it).

[dtornabene]

Both of these are still perfectly serviceable texts for common lisp purely in terms of "can I run this code from 20+ years ago unchanged on sbcl I just installed via a package manager?". Practical Common Lisp is simply a phenomenal textbook in terms of pedagogy.

[ngcc_hk]

But for simply and phone based game, would concentrate on JS better than on CL due to the support, and easy of doing both desktop and phone. Wonder?