Learn Lisp the Hard Way

Thanks for the repleis! I'm currently close to web development (as people nowadays) so that's why I'm thinking about learning clojure/script rather than Lisp - because I can use clojure in daily work but not Lisp.

And it looks like my webhost is now automatically blocking the process. Sorry everyone!

Just a quick note, even though it's been mentioned already: I let people and even encourage them to copy my method and use a similar title to me own Learn X The Hard Way. That is all.

The best lisp book I have found to learn Lisp, while really understanding all that's happening underneath is "COMMON LISP: An Interactive Approach".

Basically, there's no hand waving in this book. It doesn't teach you to have a lisp blog in five minutes doing copy paste of code you don't understand.

It respects you as a smart learner, and makes you write the code, you learn doing stuff by yourself being smartly led by the author, and by the end of the book you have written a very complex piece of software with many advanced concepts and you understand more about lisp than you could have by following endless web tutorials.

The book can be downloaded from: http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~shapiro/Commonlisp/

It is to me a vastly underrated resource for all people interested in Lisp.

You're right, of course. It's a little overwhelming at times, how much interest and attention this project has garnered---especially so early into the 2nd draft, where I'm still shaping the breadth, depth, scope, and direction of the content. The first time this project was posted to Hacker News earlier this year, I felt forced to push out exercises for the first two chapters as quickly as possible, just to give visitors some material to actually work with; but they do not yet reflect the final style and methodology that I'm aiming for. I do want to make it clear, though, that I'm not going to stop working on this project until it meets the standards set down by Zed Shaw for LxTHW-based books.

The most important factor, as I understand it, is the show-don't-tell method; it's also the most difficult to achieve for a language like Common Lisp, which is so foreign to most people. For the purposes of this draft-in-progress, however, just consider every explanation currently in the text as a placeholder for concrete examples that will illustrate the point better.

Another important factor is the pace of each exercise. One of the biggest features I noticed about Zed Shaw's Learn Code The Hard Way books is how perfectly he scaled the difficulty of progressive exercises, to maintain an even pace. For an absolute beginner to programming, an exercise should take no more than an hour to complete---and that's a goal I'm working towards for LLTHW as well.

To achieve these goals, once I finish laying out the content and direction with the intro text to each chapter, I'm going to be working backwards in each Part, writing progressively easier exercises, to make sure that all necessary material is covered, and that the pace is structured properly. But even once the 2nd draft is complete, I will still be relying on user feedback to adjust the ordering and pace of the material, as needed.

Thanks for your feedback, and I hope you'll continue participating in this project as I work out all the kinks!