LISP for beginners

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Rui
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Aug 15, 2008 7:15 am
Location: Portugal

LISP for beginners

Post by Rui » Wed Jan 20, 2010 5:56 am

I'm an enthusiastic of programming languages and some time ago I've found about the Lisp world. I must say that those concepts behind all those dialects really attract me. Unfortunately the lack of time keeps preventing me from dedicating more time to study Lisp, in which I'm still a beginner, although I have some experience with several other languages. I would really love to learn more about it and contribute to help other people with it in the future.
In my opinion the resources available are a bit "complicated" for beginners, it would be great having something like "Lisp from the very beginning" explaining everything related to REPL, IDEs/programming environments, giving examples, showing experiences, what it does, what could be done. Do you guys feel it makes sense putting some effort in that direction?

nuntius
Posts: 538
Joined: Sat Aug 09, 2008 10:44 am
Location: Newton, MA

Re: LISP for beginners

Post by nuntius » Wed Jan 20, 2010 12:04 pm

If you don't like any of the free online texts, you might consider contributing to the CL wikibook.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Common_Lisp

Unfortunately, good ideas are more plentiful than programmers at this point in time.

Destruct1
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Jan 20, 2010 1:40 am

Re: LISP for beginners

Post by Destruct1 » Mon Feb 01, 2010 3:23 am

"Lisp: A gentle Introduction" is available free online and a good book for beginners.

The other books which are often mentioned are "Ansi common lisp" and "Practical Common Lisp".
I think neither of these are good for a beginner.

JamesF
Posts: 98
Joined: Thu Jul 10, 2008 7:14 pm

Re: LISP for beginners

Post by JamesF » Sat Feb 06, 2010 6:34 pm

I actually found Practical Common Lisp to be very useful. Prior to that, I'd done various bits of scripting and programming in unix shell, SQL, Perl and PHP, so I wasn't a total beginner to programming. However, it's the best introduction to Lisp itself I've found.

After that, it'll be worth looking up Paul Graham's On Lisp,and the Hyperspec, which is available from Lispworks's site.

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