Totally grok Lisp

You grok lisp if understand this:
> (setq a 1)
> (setq b 2)
> (setq c 3)
> (first ‘(a b c))

a

If you understand why you get the symbol a ( and
not 1), you grok the essence of lisp.

“Lisp, Lore and Logic” W. Richard Stark

worth checking the library for

Just got my copy of Paul Grahms ‘ANSI Common Lisp’ in the mail yesterday. So far, it’s pretty intuitive. I’ve read the first chapter and plan on doing the examples at the end.

I think this article is pretty good:)
http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html

This one seems pretty clueful, doing things like spam filters and ID3v2 decoder, instead of the typical lame stuff that one could as easily do in Fortran.

http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

I like how “Totally grok Lisp” is different from just “Learn Lisp”. From what I can tell they are two very distinct goals. Once you truly grok Lisp it will change your mind forever.

So, don’t bother to “Report a very similar goal”, because it’s not that similar.

I started a new job a couple of weeks ago, and it’s going to involve quite a lot of Lisp. I’ve never touched Lisp before (barely even heard of it in fact) – I have a web-development background mainly, so in the past I’ve doen a lot of Perl and PHP, amongst other things..but…..

I’m totally hooked on Lisp now – it’s the most elegant, fluid and powerful language I’ve come across – and it’s fun…now all I have to do is learn to use it :)