What's your favorite book about Lisp?

[findinglisp]

The one place where ANSI Common Lisp lacks versus Practical Common Lisp is with respect to CLOS. PG is not a fan of CLOS and doesn't really cover it. In contrast, Peter Siebel uses is heavily in PCL. That's one reason I recommend both to people. You'll definitely learn something from each.

[finnrobi]

Out of the books on that list, SICP is my favorite, but strictly speaking it is less 'about' lisp than those of the others I have read. My second choice is PAIP.

[habib]

You might add "Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computing" by David Touretzky, which is particularly good for beginners.

Seconded! It's a brilliant book for new-comers to Lisp without an extensive programming background. You can get it here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/index.html

After which I would recommend following Nick Levine's lectures that guide you through ANSI Common Lisp and add a few more exercises and a project. Available here:
http://www.nicklevine.org/declarative/lectures/

[Alexander Lehmann]

The one place where ANSI Common Lisp lacks versus Practical Common Lisp is with respect to CLOS. PG is not a fan of CLOS and doesn't really cover it. In contrast, Peter Siebel uses is heavily in PCL. That's one reason I recommend both to people. You'll definitely learn something from each.

Dito. Also, PCL is sometimes easier to comprehend than ACL, whereas I find that ACL in spite of being a little bit more "sophisticated" is worth reading it twice or maybe even three times.

[jast]

I like both ACL and PCl but to be honest, for someone who wants to start learning Lisp, I recommend ACL. I feel that PCL is best suited for a person who already has some contact with the language. Even if that contact is not much! Both books are complementary to each other so using both at the same time to learn the language might be a good option. But my favourite Lisp book is still PAIP, perhaps because of the huge influence it had on me when I read it

[nklein]

I voted for ACL over PCL (although i like them both) for its style, exercises, and appendix B and D.

Agreed about ACL over PCL (as long as I'm remembering right and Appendix B is the Lisp in Lisp section).

Sadly, neither book address the pile of soup that is (loop ...). Each have a few examples. I'd like to be able to read (loop ...) calls even if I stick to (do ...) and (do* ...) when writing my own code. What's the best book/resource for learning about (loop ...)?

[Alexander Lehmann]

The HyperSpec. There's a pretty good description of loop's BNF. But I must admit that it takes some time to work through this page.

[plutonas]

@findinglisp:
you can get the pdf of "On Lisp" and print it out yourself. Thats what i did, and it's worth it.

[findinglisp]

@findinglisp:
you can get the pdf of "On Lisp" and print it out yourself. Thats what i did, and it's worth it.

Yea, I have the PDF. I have read about 90% of it on-screen (airplanes, etc.). I haven't wanted to print it out to save the trees, and at the time I first started reading it, I heard that APress was going to reprint it. That would have been ideal, had it happened.

[Geoff Wozniak]

I picked The Art of the Metaobject Protocol simply because I learned more about programming from that book than any other I've ever read. I've read most of them (even CLTL2!) and they're all enjoyable. I'd have to pick Norvig's PAIP as my second.