

A gentle introduction to Lisp - nkh
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/index.html
I found this book to be an extremely clear introduction.
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jacquesm
Thank you nkh.

We should start a nice collection of free programming books like this, there
are quite a few of them.

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mahmud
<http://www.reddit.com/r/csbooks>

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bradfordw
Heh, as if I didn't have enough to read already on top of work and school.
This is great, thanks for posting!

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fogus
My first Lisp book. Oh the memories.

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felideon
Likewise, although I kind of read it alongside PCL. A chapter or two in Gentle
Intro, and then the similar/counterpart chapter in PCL.

<http://gigamonkeys.com/book/>

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kqr2
Paul Graham's _On Lisp_ :

<http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html>

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mnemonik
... but I would hardly put On Lisp in the same "gentle" category as
Touretzky's book. A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation could easily
be someone's first ever programming book. Show me the person whose
introduction to programming was On Lisp and I will show you either someone who
got fed up real quick, or someone who is a whole lot smarter than me and the
coders I know.

I would probably recommend this order:

1\. Gentle Intro

2\. Practical Common Lisp

3\. On Lisp

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sown
As an aside, is there a gentle introduction to prolog?

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xel02
There is are a couple <http://www.learnprolognow.org/>
<http://www.amzi.com/AdventureInProlog/advfrtop.htm>

A good way is to look at maybe the lecture notes of an undergrad functional
programming course. They usually present it quite simply.

Unfortunately the course at UBC does not post the lectures online openly but
rather through a restricted CMS.

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jister
I like the "gentle" word in the title. Makes it less intimidating, well at
least for me.

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access_denied
The elisp tutorial that comes with emacs is a well written starting-point for
the total beginner.

[http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-lisp-
intro/html_node...](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-lisp-
intro/html_node/index.html)

~~~
nickyp
There's also Common Lisp: First Contact:
[http://homepage.mac.com/svc/CommonLispFirstContact/index.htm...](http://homepage.mac.com/svc/CommonLispFirstContact/index.html)

A very nice 15-page PDF hands-on introduction, in a nice layout optimized for
screen-reading on our fancy widescreen displays ;-)

