Study Lisp

Well, I’ve been reading everything I can about Lisp for months. I’ve read about 80% of the book, Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel. It is definitely the best introduction to Common Lisp out there. It is available on the Web too. I have been reading the book, ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham. There are a couple of other books available on the Web that I’ve been reading parts of too. One is Successful Lisp by David B. Lamkins. The other is Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation. It is wonderful to see great books like this available online.

There are many other resources available online. I read Planet Lisp daily. I read the news group comp.lang.lisp regularly. It can be entertaining sometimes in a weird sort of way. Lemonodor is another blog I check daily. Since it isn’t included in Planet Lisp anymore, I check it separately. It is a good read! The other day I read Pascal Costanza’s Highly Opinionated Guide to Lisp. He did a great job, I liked it a lot. There is a lot of good information in his guide.

There is a lot of interesting Common Lisp information easily available. I’m now using what little time I have and actually coding. I’m really enjoying it. It is definitely a major change from the Basic style of languages I know. I feel very far behind the veteran Common Lisp coders as a programmer. My skills are in the Basic style of languages and I’m self taught. I first learned how to program Basic on a Commodore 64. I dabbled in Fortran in college. Through the years I’ve learned Foxpro, Visual Basic, VBScript ASP and HTML/XHTML. So Common Lisp is totally different than what I’m accustomed too. But my plan is to become a better programmer, so I think I’m on the right track.