Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!nntp.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: tpeplt Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Resources to learn common lisp? Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:44:12 -0500 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 62 Message-ID: <87seavm3wj.fsf@gmail.com> References: <874inbqdz7.fsf@mariorosell.es> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:44:13 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="e16a16d29169815002b1a8c53374a93d"; logging-data="823712"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/AhpznFvnBnIkcdTUG9EZT48yl1tllUlY=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Cancel-Lock: sha1:Y1bkK4VR7wM7gO0TPRfv7iTS9eo= sha1:vCpetsuv9ifZDoYkllCIvImlpW8= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.lisp:60744 Mario Rosell writes: > Hello everyone! > > I want to learn Common Lisp, but I don't really know what resources to > use. > > What did you all use to learn? Is that even relevant? Is this newsgroup > active? > > Thanks for everyone in advice A place where you can start is with David S. Touretzky’s book "COMMON LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation", which Carnegie-Mellon University has made available for download as a PDF file: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/book.pdf In addition to the text that teaches you Common Lisp, it includes exercises, answers to the exercises, and a glossary to get the definitions of terms. Although you can read the book, you will want to be able to evaluate expressions both to practice and the confirm that you understand what you are doing. Some readers of this group might have a Lisp that they will recommend. I recommend that you start by installing GNU Emacs on your computer. It is a text editor that comes with its own Lisp, called Emacs Lisp, that is similar enough to Common Lisp that you will be able to complete many of the exercises without installing a Lisp. Over decades, Emacs has been developed so that it can be used as an environment that is highly-optimized for Lisp programming, including Scheme and Common Lisp. If you have not used Emacs and are able to install it, then you will want to look carefully the first time that you start running it. You should see the following two links: Emacs Tutorial Emacs Guided Tour The tutorial gets you started on using Emacs and the guided tour shows you some of the capabilities that the editor. The guided tour uses one of Emacs’s built-in web browsers to download into the editor a web page with text and images to give the tour. You should also read the built-in manual titled "Introduction to Emacs Lisp", which is available inside Emacs via its menu: menu -> Help -> More Manuals -> Introduction to Emacs Lisp You might consider reading this (much smaller) book BEFORE reading "Gentle Intro." because it will quickly give you an idea of whether you want to learn Lisp. -- The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. - Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parliament of Birds.