I’ve used ANSI Common Lisp in the past to learn lisp. It’s a great reference but the examples (except for the one where you build an OO language) never appealed to me.

I’ve started reading Peter Siebel’s new book online and the first example (a simple database) has made lots of stuff fall into place. I understood Lisp but never understood the context in which to apply stuff. I’m getting the hardcover version of Practical Common Lisp when it comes out in April. I still like ACL for a reference but PCL’s examples can’t be beat.

Kudos to SLIME too. A good, easy to install LISP IDE that I don’t have to shell cash out for. Plus it worked with all the CL implementations (SBCL, CLISP, OpenMCL) I’ve tried. Used it to try the example in PCL and it made things much more fun!