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LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation

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Over twenty years ago when I was beginning my journey into the study of computer science, I was a college math teacher. When my colleague that taught computer science began praising the programming language LISP I went to the library and checked out a book. At the time I could program in Basic and Fortran and knew a little Pascal but I was lost less than 10 pages into the book I was trying to read. The LISP language seemed impossible; the syntax was so odd that I almost gave up hope in trying to learn it.

Fortunately, before I did that I went back to my colleague and asked him if he knew of a good book for learning LISP and one of those he suggested was this one. As I started banging my way through the exercises I stumbled at first but it did not take long before the light bulb went off and it started making sense. Reading through it and trying a few of the examples the different way to program represented by LISP began to sink in. Although I never became terribly fluent in the language, I learned enough LISP reading this book in combination with a few others so that I could intelligently handle the sections involving LISP when I later taught a course in programming language concepts.