common-lisp Getting started with common-lisp Common Lisp Learning Resources
Example
Online Books
These are books that are freely accessible online.
- Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel is a good introduction to CL for experienced programmers, which tries to highlight from the very beginning what makes CL different to other languages.
- Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation by David S. Touretzky is a good introduction for people new to programming.
- Common Lisp: An interactive approach by Stuart C. Shapiro was used as a course textbook, and course notes accompany the book on the website.
- Common Lisp, the Language by Guy L. Steele is a description of the Common Lisp language. According to the CLiki it is outdated, but it contains better descriptions of the loop macro and format than the Common Lisp Hyperspec does.
- On Lisp by Paul Graham is a great book for intermediately experienced Lispers.
- Let Over Lambda by Doug Hoyte is an advanced book on Lisp Macros. Several people recommended that you be comfortable with On Lisp before reading this book, and that the start is slow.
Online References
- The Common Lisp Hyperspec is the language reference document for Common Lisp.
- The Common Lisp Cookbook is a list of useful Lisp recipes. Also contains a list of other online sources of CL information.
- Common Lisp Quick Reference has printable Lisp reference sheets.
- Lispdoc.com searches several sources of Lisp information (Practical Common Lisp, Successful Lisp, On Lisp, the HyperSpec) for documentation.
- L1sp.org is a redirect service for documentation.
Offline Books
These are books that you'll likely have to buy, or lend from a library.
- ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham.
- Common Lisp Recipes by Edmund Weitz.
- Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming has many interesting applications of Lisp, but is not a good reference for AI any more.
Online Communities
- The CLiki has a great Getting Started Page. A great resource for all things CL. Has an extensive list of Lisp books.
- Common Lisp subreddit has loads of useful links and reference documents in the sidebar.
- IRC: #lisp, #ccl, #sbcl and others on Freenode.
- Common-Lisp.net provides hosting for many common lisp projects and user groups.
Libraries
- Quicklisp is library manager for Common Lisp, and has a long list of supported libraries.
- Quickdocs hosts library documentation for many CL libraries.
- Awesome CL is a community-driven curated list of libraries, frameworks and other shiny stuff sorted by category.
Pre-packaged Lisp Environments
These are Lisp editing environments that are easy to install and get started with because everything you need is pre-packaged and pre-configured.
- Portacle is a portable and multiplatform Common Lisp environment. It ships a slightly customized Emacs with Slime, SBCL (a popular Common Lisp implementation), Quicklisp and Git. No installation needed, so it's a very quick and easy way to get going.
- Lispbox is an IDE (Emacs + SLIME), Common Lisp environment (Clozure Common Lisp) and library manager (Quicklisp), pre-packaged as archives for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Descendant of "Lisp in a Box" Recommended in the Practical Common Lisp book.
- Not pre-packed, but SLIME turns Emacs into a Common Lisp IDE, and has a user manual to help you get started. Requires a separate Common Lisp implementation.
Common Lisp Implementations
This section lists some common CL implementations and their manuals. Unless otherwise noted, these are free software implementations. See also the Cliki's list of free software Common Lisp Implementations, and Wikipedia's list of commercial Common Lisp Implementations.
- Allegro Common Lisp (ACL) and manual. Commercial, but has a free Express Edition and training videos on Youtube.
- CLISP and manual.
- Clozure Common Lisp (CCL) and manual.
- Carnegie Mellon University Common Lisp (CMUCL), has a manual and other useful information page.
- Embeddable Common Lisp (ECL) and manual.
- LispWorks and manual. Commercial, but has a Personal Edition with some limitations.
- Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) and manual.
- Scieneer Common Lisp (SCL) and manual is a commercial Linux and Unix implementation, but has an unrestricted free evaluation and non-commercial use version.
