Getting Started

Download Common Lisp

Learn Common Lisp

There are many great lisp books available. A current and especially good introduction is Practical Common Lisp_. A good way to get started quickly and for free is to download lisp in a box and work through the first couple of chapters in this book.

Practical Lisp Programming gives some real world advice.

Common lisp convention that you'll see in source code

See Coding Convention and Naming conventions.

Choose an editor

Packages

Where to learn more

Tips and Hints

When most people download a tarball of a Lisp system for the first time, they don't know the many little gotchas that can crop up, particularly when it comes to installing and using the many Lisp utilities and programs already out there. This page attempts to be a collection of practical examples showing new lispers how to get things set up.

Here are some things to remember right off the bat:

Lisp images distributed with distributions tend to be a bit minimalistic, on the theory that what you want to add you can. This means that there is a fair chance downloading a nifty tool and installing it won't work out of box. So some setup work at the beginning will save you grief later.
Remember, you're not in configure, make, make install world anymore. Lisp operates differently, and you'll have to think a little differently to make things work successfully. But then, that's why this is here.

The first things you're probably going to want to install are asdf and mk-defsystem, the two most popular tools for managing complex lisp applications. These will be required by a large number of tools out there. So, we will begin with those.

The first thing is, we're not going to install them in any sense you're probably used to. We're going to create your own personal init file and local lisp storage directory, and pretty much everything will go in there. See here for an example setup.

Contributors: Eric Normand Others

This page is linked from: Education index Installing OpenMCL on Mac OS X LispNewbies The Proper Way to Do Things

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