Common Lisp: First Contact

Common Lisp: First Contact is an easy to read introduction to Lisp. The goal is to make you familiar with Lisp syntax and with how Lisp works. Nothing more than a basic understanding of computing is required.

Download Common Lisp: First Contact, a 128Kb PDF optimized for screen reading.

Version 1.3 - April 18 2008 - Sven Van Caekenberghe.

Contents

• Learning to talk
• Making lists
• It's more fun to compute
• Infinite combinations
• Remember me
• And I quote
• Powerful spells
• Define that, please
• Powerful spells revisited
• Where to go from here ?
• Appendix 1: Getting Common Lisp
• Appendix 2: The cl-1st-contact library
• Bibliography

Reactions

Jonathan Gardner

Pretty nice tutorial and introduction. The part about working with files was new to me, and it was quickly absorbed. I would certainly recommend it to my friends.

Jens Teich

Really nice tutorial.

Gary King

Your document is a nice short and sweet intro do Lisp. Very cool.

Baishampayan Ghose

Thank you for the wonderful _Common Lisp: First Contact_. It's really a nice introductory text on Common Lisp and I am sure it will help many newcomers.

Disclaimer

This is not an complete introduction in computer programming using Common Lisp. There are many excellent introductions and books for learning Common Lisp. They all become quite technical and complex early on: they kind of have to, because they want to teach you how powerful and flexible Lisp is. Teaching how Lisp really works also requires long and deep explanations. This introduction tries to confront the reader gently with Lisp, explaining the necessary concepts in a cautiously selected order. I try to never lie, but certainly don't always tell the whole truth because that would make things too complex. I try to avoid technical and Lisp specific jargon as much as possible.

The cl-1st-contact Library

To support the examples in Common Lisp: First Contact, a small library was created. By loading this library you can run the examples yourself. Like most modern CL libraries, cl-1st-contact uses the ASDF mechanism compilation, loading and possibly installation.

Download CommonLispFirstContact.zip, a 38Kb ZIP archive, to get all the files that you need.

If you are not familiar with ASDF and/or don't have it configured properly or if you just want to play with the code without installing anything, just load the file load-me.lisp and you are done.