Successful Lisp

by David B. Lamkins · first published 2004

12mentions

9recommended by

12HN commenters

2007–2025first – last mentioned

75% recommend25% neutral

Why HN recommends it

Free, well-organized tour of Common Lisp with a nutshell introduction in chapter 3 and a suggested reading order; suited to beginners to intermediate programmers, often paired with Practical Common Lisp.

Summarised by Claude from recommending comments

Lisp & Functional

According to the author's website this book: * Provides an overview of Common Lisp for the working programmer. * Introduces key concepts in an easy-to-read format. * Describes format, typical use, and possible drawbacks of all important Lisp constructs. * Provides practical advice for the construction of Common Lisp programs. * Shows examples of how Common Lisp is best used. * Illustrates and compares features of the most popular Common Lisp systems on desktop computers. * Includes discussion and examples of advanced constructs for iteration, error hand

BuyBookshop.org Amazon

Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

View on Open Library

Mentions per year

What Hacker News says

fractallyte · Jul 31, 2013 · Recommends

Don't forget 'Successful Lisp' by David Lamkins (http://psg.com/~dlamkins/sl/) - in printed-book or HTML versions. Chapter 3 is an excellent 'nutshell' introduction to Common Lisp. The rest of the book, aside from covering various…
on “A Common Lisp Bookshelf” ↗
z0ltan · Dec 4, 2016 · Recommends

Definitely this book. I would recommend keeping Graham's books for later. Practical Common Lisp + Land of Lisp + Common Lisp recipes + the Lisp Hyperspec = Profit! Additional readings: Successful Lisp (Lamkins - very underrated), Paul Graham's books, and Hoyte's Let Over Lambda (advanced).
on “Practical Common Lisp (2005)” ↗
groovy2shoes · Mar 27, 2016 · Recommends

…omitted from IEEE, but most Schemes have it) at the REPL to import definitions from a file (or there's always good ol' copy+paste). If you want to learn Common Lisp rather than Scheme, you can check out "Successful Lisp" by David Lamkins and/or "Practical Common Lisp" by Peter Seibel, both of which are freely readable on the Web. You'll also want to keep the ANSI Common Lisp HyperSpec by Kent Pitman handy as a reference…
on “Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language” ↗
eimrine · Sep 4, 2022 · Recommends

Successful Lisp David B. Lamkins
on “SBCL 2.2.8” ↗
yrashk · Sep 24, 2007 · Recommends

I approached it by following my guru's advice, after having fun with Python, OCaml, Erlang; learing Lisp was pain first and then fun. Paul's book explained a lot, as well as Successful Lisp. And yes, browing HyperSpec a lot makes sense!
on “Ask news.YC: For the lisp experts - tell me how you learned the language.” ↗
jsmcgd · Mar 4, 2008 · Recommends

…comments of pchristensen's blog recommended the book 'Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation'. I flicked through the first few chapters and for what it's worth it seems pretty good. Also 'Successful Lisp' is pretty good too. Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/ Successful Lisp: http://psg.com/~dlamkins/Site/sl.html
on “How To Learn Lisp” ↗
georgeolivergo · Dec 15, 2010 · Recommends

…also important to find where the contemporary work and discussion happens, what the current best practices are, and so on. For books for the beginner to intermediate programmer, I would go with PCL and Successful Lisp in tandem; for cross-platform implementations SBCL and Clozure (formerly OpenMCL). And of course, this: http://abhishek.geek.nz/docs/lisp-answers/.
on “Starting with Lisp: A collection of beginner pointers” ↗
vindarel · Oct 11, 2018 · Recommends

In [Successful Lisp, how to understand and use CL](http://www.communitypicks.com/r/lisp/s/17592186045679-succes...) there is a chapter on debugging. Book's site, free dl: https://successful-lisp.blogspot.com Also, it may…
on “A new version of Common-Lisp.net has been launched” ↗
Jach · Aug 30, 2025 · Recommends

…update-instance-for-redefined-class method. (Methods aren't owned by classes, unlike other OOP languages, which I think eliminates a lot of the OOP design problems associated with those other languages.) I like the book Successful Lisp as a tour of Common Lisp, it's got a suggested reading order in ch 2 for different skill levels: https://dept-info.labri.fr/~strandh/Teaching/MTP/Common/Davi... It's dated in parts as far as tooling goes…
on “Lisp from Nothing, Second Edition” ↗
znpy · May 17, 2016 · Mentions

I bought Graham's "Ansi Common Lisp" book and read it briefly, and tried to write some code as well. I also read "Successful Lisp" briefly. Hoping to give constructive feedback and not to start a flame, here are some opinions/impressions. Please note that : 1. These are mostly impressions, not complete opinions. 2. I am only…
on “Why didn't Common Lisp fix the world?” ↗
Fixnum · May 7, 2010 · Mentions

…http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/ "Concrete Abstractions." http://gustavus.edu/+max/concrete-abstractions.html Lisp: "Common Lisp the language, 2nd edition." http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/cltl2.html "Successful Lisp." http://www.psg.com/~dlamkins/sl/ "Common Lisp: an interactive approach". http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~shapiro/Commonlisp/ Ocaml: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis500/cis500-f02/resources/ocaml... (draft)…
on “Ask HN: Free Programming eBooks” ↗
kagevf · Jun 20, 2024 · Mentions

…the UB in C that you mentioned. Until seeing that post, I wasn't really aware of that potential issue with literals, so I think it's good to point these things out. Recently, I saw it was mentioned in "Successful Lisp"; it might be mentioned in other books I've read, but maybe I just didn't pick up on it.
on “Spur – RISC IV: The Lisp Multiprocessor Workstation” ↗