It’s a fine first book. I’d certainly recommend it.
I don’t recall if it has instructions on getting a dev env up and running, but if it does I imagine they’re out of date. Emacs with Sly or SLIME is what I’ve used, but I believe there are viable options for proper interactive development in vim and vs code among others.
If you just use a basic editor and paste code into a repl in a terminal you won’t be getting the experience most Lispers do.
Practical Common Lisp is a fantastic read, but Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation gets my vote as the best book for Common Lisp beginners. Working through it was a joy.
I recommend the gentle introduction to Lisp book for the complete beginner.
The chapter on files in the Practical Common Lisp book wasn't complete enough for me to read a one line file of 800MB which is part of the Harvard Library Open Metadata archived set.
I don’t recall if it has instructions on getting a dev env up and running, but if it does I imagine they’re out of date. Emacs with Sly or SLIME is what I’ve used, but I believe there are viable options for proper interactive development in vim and vs code among others.
If you just use a basic editor and paste code into a repl in a terminal you won’t be getting the experience most Lispers do.