The SAAS course was more recent, so it's possible that Land of Lisp would be a lot easier for me than it was before. The "mathy" kinds of puzzles weren't a problem as I was a math major back in the day -- it was some kind of configuration issue. I remember having spent a lot of time googling and on message boards before turning my attention elsewhere. For the half of the book or so that I got through, it was really interesting. I still like how it eventually teaches you how to build a whole web server from the ground up.
It might be helpful to install VM with some Linux if you haven't done so. I'm not sure what the config issue was because I don't know much about Common Lisp, but I wouldn't doubt the issue was something irt to Windows if that is the environment you are using. You'll also discover that many items you want to use in your projects may not be available on Windows at all, and with Linux, you just do an install command and it just works.
I want to clarify that the reason things aren't available on Windows isn't because of some belief system from the Open Source community: it is because deploying for Windows is really tough.
As far as I know, it doesn't matter what distro you use. I went ahead and installed Arch Linux and I love it.
