Online Tutorial

Recommended for beginners

• Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp (see also Practical Common Lisp on cliki)
• David B. Lamkins' Successful Lisp book (non-free)

• Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation by David S. Touretzky (non-free)

• Casting SPELs in Lisp -- A (tutorial about lisp macros) Comic Book by Conrad Barski, M.D.

• COMMON LISP: An Interactive Approach, by Stuart C. Shapiro (non-free)

Futher reading

See also the online Documentation, and Lisp Books.

• 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.

• The Common Lisp Cookbook (see also Cookbook on cliki) is online now. We need contributors, so please help us out!

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)
• Uni Trier has ELM-ART, an interactive web-based lisp tutorial. Available in English and German. (Last change: 2003)
• 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)
• Introdução à Linguagem Lisp. Tutorial by João Cachopo and António Leitão. Excercises with answers. In Portuguese. (1995)

Tutorials of unknown quality

(This section is not meant as an insult to the respective authors, but to indicate that the following tutorials haven't been known to be used successfully by people in the past few years.) If the recommended tutorials above don't meet your tastes, try the tutorials in this section, but keep in mind that the Common Lisp ANSI standard was finished in 1996.

• A short and old Common Lisp Tutorial by Geoffrey J. Gordon (1993)
• Lisp Primer by Colin Allen nd Maneesh Dhagat. (1999-2006, updates not marked)
• Common Lisp, Typing and Mathematics: a tutorial by Francis Sergeraert intended to help mathematicians understand how the language can be used for mathematical applications (2001)
• Introduction à la programmation en Common Lisp written by Francis Leboutte. A short introduction to CL and programming. In French. (2002, minor updates in 2004)
• Basic Lisp Techniques: an introductory (non-free) book by David Cooper on how Lisp is used for solving problems. Exercises rely on Allegro Common Lisp. (2003)
• Mark Watson's book Loving Lisp, or the Savy Programmer's Secret Weapon is available for download. (non-free) (Last update: 2002)
• The Dynamic Learning Center by unknown author(s). (unknown last update date)
• Practical Lisp Programming A tutorial for beginners which explains how to set up a Lisp system for maximum productivity. Covers ilisp, installing the online references (CLtL2 and the hyperspec), important libraries which may not come with your implementation (defsystem? and others). Unknown author, work in progress (unknown last update)

Broken links

These texts were linked here in the past but haven't been updated in a long time or have gone dead:

• A Brief tutorial on the Lambda Calculus, functional programming, and LISP (link is dead), by Thomas Fischbacher "(...) providing background information about its mathematical foundations as well as general functional programming techniques and was given as a series of three talks at the Albert Einstein Institute in January 2003. The incentive to hold this lecture came from the observation that for a considerable number of problems with mainly combinational background, it is possible to out-perform many symbolic algebra packages by orders of magnitude with LISP."
• Marinette Revenu's tutorial. In French. Covers CLOS, also. (link is dead)

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