Best lisp programming books according to redditors

C is a pretty simple language so I imagine you already know the syntax and basic methodology. What C requires is a bit of discipline. To produce maintainable results you need good coding hygiene for lack of a better word.

For this, and especially as a new graduate I would recommend The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike. Kernighan is the K of K&R C. Pike was the original captain of the USS Enterprise.

If you want an antique for your shelf, grab a copy of The Elements of Programming Style, also co-authored by Kernighan.

If you want some interesting projects, go down the Osdev.org rabbit hole. Plenty there to exercise your memory management and pointer foo.

Build your own Lisp is another that teaches some nuts and bolts of programming. Official free on line version

Some context, I've been living in this house for about 3 years now, my girlfriend and i moved in to take care of the owner of the house. Turns out that he was a big lisp / scheme hacker back in the 80s-90s and had developed a lot of cutting edge tech in his hay day. Anyway, these books have been hiding in his library downstairs...

It was like finding a bunch of hidden magical scrolls of lost knowledge :)

edit: I will compile a list of the books later. I'm out doing 4th of July things.

update: List of books

• Lisp: Style and Design by Molly M. Miller and Eric Benson
  ISBN: 1-55558-044-0
  
  
• Common Lisp The Language Second Edition by Guy L. Steele
  ISBN: 1-55558-042-4
  
  
• The Little LISPer Trade Edition by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen
  ISBN: 0-262-56038-0
  
  
• Common LISPcraft by Robert Wilensky
  ISBN: 0-393-95544-3
  
  
• Object-Oriented Programming in Common Lisp by Sonya E. Keene
  ISBN: 0-201-17589-4
  
  
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman w/Julie Sussman
  ISBN: 0-07-000-422-6
  
  
• ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham
  ISBN: 0-13-370875-6
  
  
• Programming Paradigms in LISP by Rajeev Sangal
  ISBN: 0-07-054666-5
  
  
• The Art of the Metaobject Protocol by Gregor Kiczales, Jim des Rivieres, and Daniel G. Bobrow
  ISBN: 0-262-11158-6
  
  
• Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp by Peter Norvig
  ISBN: 1-55860-191-0
  
  
• Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel
  ISBN: 1-59059-239-5
  
  
• Common Lisp The Language by Guy L. Steele
  ISBN: 0-932376-41-X
  
  
• Anatomy of Lisp by John Allen
  ISBN: 0-07-001115-X
  
  
• Lisp Objects, and Symbolic Programming by Robert R. Kessler
  ISBN: 0-673-39773-4
  
  
• Performance and Evaluation of Lisp Systems by Richard P. Gabriel
  ISBN: 0-262-07093-6
  
  
• A Programmer's Guide to Common Lisp by Deborah G. Tatar
  ISBN: 0-932376-87-8
  
  
• Understanding CLOS The Common Lisp Object System by Jo A. Lawless and Molly M. Miller
  ISBN: 0-13-717232-X
  
  
• The Common Lisp Companion by Tim D. Koschmann
  ISBN: 0-417-50308-8
  
  
• Symbolic Computing with Lisp and Prolog by Robert A. Mueller and Rex L. Page
  ISBN: 0-471-60771-1
  
  
• Scheme and the Art of Programming by George Springer and Daniel P. Friedman
  ISBN: 0-262-19288-8
  
  
• Programming In Scheme by Michael Eisenberg
  ISBN: 0-262-55017-2
  
  
• The Schematics of Computation by Vincent S. Manis and James J. Little
  ISBN: 0-13-834284-9
  
  
• The Joy of Clojure by Michael Fogus and Chris Houser
  ISBN: 1-935182-64-1
  
  
• Clojure For The Brave and True by Daniel Higginbotham
  ISBN: 978-1-59327-591-4
  
  
  
  

Kinda nifty.

I'd suggest these additions:

0. Ada -- Compiles to machine, C, and Forth (planned).
0. Lisp -- can be compiled to C, and PostScript. (See these.)
0. Logo -- Can compile to PostScript.
0. PostScript
0. Forth

Something to consider...

>"Fundamentals are the psychological entry to a subject, and foundations are the logical entry. Fundamentals must be easy for the novice, while foundations can be hard for the expert. Learning a subject is movement from fundamentals to foundations."
>
>- Bruce Mills, Practical Formal Software Engineering

One sure method to begin the journey from fundamentals to foundations in learning Common Lisp is through immediate correction/feedback using the interactive "LispTutor Jr" online by carefully reading the lessons (don't skip any AND do take notes!) and doing the strictly guided / checked exercises, and then completing all of the exercises / projects in the "Land of Lisp" book.

The primary advantages are that both are used at university and that LispTutor has been proven to work.

>The original LispTutor was developed at Carnegie Mellon University by Reiser, Anderson, Corbett, Farrell and others. Lisptutor Jr is a simplified version of the system, but it is still used by many people interested in learning the classic language for Artificial Intelligence: LISP.
>
>About LispTutor Jr

As quoted above, the original LispTutor interactive training system was created at Carnegie Mellon (home of CMUCL from which SBCL is derived). It has been used there, and at other schools, to teach Common Lisp. Its contents are derived from the insightful "Essential LISP" book that was the result of AI research in determining what it takes to teach students who've never been exposed to Lisp how to program in it competently.

The special focus of the "Essential Lisp" book and the LispTutor is Iteration and Recursion, since those are often the most difficult topics for students to understand and internalize well. In fact, they cover things that no other Lisp book I've seen does, such as providing principles to help determine what the three primary variables in a particular Iterative structure should be initialized to. That alone helps reduce student error by avoiding over iterating or under iterating.