[blue1]

1. choose your lisp dialect: do you want to learn CL, Scheme, Arc, ...?

2. randomly pick an implementation of your chosen lisp. It really makes no difference as a beginner. I speak from experience. You can always switch later in a painless way.

regarding CL, choose an open source implementation if you don't fear things like emacs. If you prefer a more polished IDE, choose a commercial implementation.

[Novash]

CL on Lispbox is what I have now. Which means I use (use being a overstatement) e-Macs with a Lisp extension.

[J_McQuade]

'emacs', please!

[mahmud]

SBCL + slime + emacs on linux and you should be fine. Use clbuild to download packages.