Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Jesse Gibbons <jgibbons2357@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 2019-09-09 at 09:38 -0700, John Soo wrote:
> Hi Raghav!
> 
> >  I would like to learn programming starting with LISP
> 
> Great! Lisp is probably the best language to start with! 
> 
> Lisp books also rank among the best introductory materials to
> programming. I highly recommend these two:
> 
> - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (often called
> SICP)
> 
> This uses a dialect of scheme, so you can do the exercises without
> much translation using guile or racket. It touches on many aspects of
> computer science and I think is closest to the swiss-army knife you
> deacribed. There are also excellent lectures freely available on
> YouTube by the authors.
> 
> - Land of Lisp
> 
> This is an introduction to Common Lisp. I am less familiar with it,
> but it always comes highly recommended as a fun introduction to
> programming by writing simple games. If I’m not mistaken, it may be a
> little more pragmatic than SICP. 
> 
> Hope that helps and happy hacking!
> 
> - John
SICP is packaged in guix. "guix install sicp" will install the HTML and
info versions.
 
Land of Lisp looks good, but I haven't read it. The author helped write
"Realm of Racket" which looks very similar, but I haven't read it
either.

As for emacs lisp, the "emacs lisp intro" (aka "An Introduction to
Programming in Emacs Lisp.") is a good start and "elisp" (aka "GNU
Emacs Lisp reference manual.") is full of reference material. Both can
be downloaded from the emacs site[1] and are included in emacs by
default. (C-h i C-s "emacs lisp" should help you find them.)



[0] https://nostarch.com/realmofracket.htm
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/