Recommended for beginners
- Lisp in Small Parts.
- LispTutor Jr is an online tutorial with interactive exercises to test your knowledge and understanding.
- ELM-ART is an interactive and adaptive Web-based Lisp tutorial, itself written in Common Lisp, developed by Prof. Gerhard Weber of the University of Freiburg. Tutorial available in English and German. Type in a unique user name and password: no pre-registration step required. (Home page last changed: 2006)
- Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation by David S. Touretzky. Assumes no programming prerequisite.
- Casting SPELs in Lisp -- A Comic Book by Conrad Barski, M.D. Quick interactive intro to Lisp, including macros (aka SPELs), using an interactive adventure game example. Last updated 2008. A prequel to his book, Land Of Lisp (2010).
- Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp (see also Practical Common Lisp on cliki)
- David B. Lamkins' Successful Lisp book
- Prepare your Lisp environment(s). How to set up a Common Lisp implementation and IDE.
- COMMON LISP: An Interactive Approach, by Stuart C. Shapiro
- DataMiningTools Lisp slides are a set of slides introducing aspects of Lisp programming.
Further reading
- Slides for the ``Tutorial on Good Lisp Programming Style'' by Peter Norvig and Kent Pitman at the Lisp Users and Vendors Conference, August 10, 1993
- Heinrich Taube's Lisp Style Tips quickly covers the major points of style for efficient Lisp use for beginners.
- Pascal Costanza's Highly Opinionated Guide to Lisp
- Common Lisp: A Tutorial on Conditions and Restarts
- Advanced exception handling
- Using Common Lisp REPL tools for development and debugging.
- Lisp for the Web (See also Lisp for the Web Part II which expands on the original.)
- Common LISP Hints, by Geoffrey J. Gordon (CMUCL but also for other implementations).
- Hash Table Syntax in Common Lisp - reader macro and pretty printer tutorial
University course material
- Lisp and elements of style is a twelve-lecture course written by Nick Levine for delivery to undergraduates at Anglia Polytechnic University. It covers most introductory aspects of the language (apart from CLOS) and includes exercises, suggestions for practical sessions, two longer assignments and even an exam with model answers. Online and free. (Courses from 1999 and 2000. Last update in 2001)
- Four lisp tutorials for the CS310 class taught by Philip Fong at Simon Fraser University. The tutorials consider basic lisp programming, functional programming, data abstraction, and imperative programming. Each has exercises, source code, and solutions. (No course dates; web server says page was last updated 2005)
- Traité de Programmation en Common Lisp (in French), by Robert Strandh and Irène Durand. (2001) (old link http://dept-info.labri.u-bordeaux.fr/%7Estrandh/Teaching/Programmation-Symbolique/Common/Book/HTML/programmation.html is dangling).
- Introdução à Linguagem Lisp. Tutorial by João Cachopo and António Menezes Leitão. Excercises with answers. In Portuguese. (1995)
- Although teaching Scheme, Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) course taught at MIT is a very good resource for learning how to think in Lisp. Videos of lectures are available from CSAIL, or streaming on Google Video.
- EECS 325 Lecture Notes
- Class materials for the SDF online Common Lisp course.
Implementation Provided Tutorials
Those are Common Lisp tutorial provided by implementations. They may have some implementation specific examples, but may still be useful to all.
- clisp LISP-tutorial.txt
- Basic Lisp Techniques, by David Cooper, Jr., a comprehensive basic Lisp workbook (some Allegro CL dependencies).
Cliki Tutorials
- CloserLookAtCharacters - Characters are not their codes -- Encodings and external format in Common Lisp
- CloserLookAtSyntax - From time to time, we see lisp very newbies try to write "blocks" of expressions within parentheses like:
- copying problem - Placeholder for the idea that there is no 'copy of this object' in Lisp
- Exporting Struct-Related Functions - Brief discussion of functions to be considered for export when creating Lisp structures with defstruct
- Practical Common Lisp - "Practical Common Lisp", an introduction to Common Lisp by Peter Seibel, available on the web at http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ and also in dead-tree form from Apress
- TutorialClispDebugger - Small Clisp Debugger Tutorial
- TutorialSpecialVariables - Mini Tutorial Special Variables