Practical Common Lisp, along with pg's essays on Lisp, can be credited with inspiring the Lisp renaissance of the mid-2000s. It's an incredibly good book, show

Practical Common Lisp, along with pg's essays on Lisp, can be credited with inspiring the Lisp renaissance of the mid-2000s. It's an incredibly good book, showing Lisp (unlike Scheme) is a practical programming language, with the ability to go from low-level bit-twiddling all the way up to very high levels of abstraction. Reading it was eye-opening. I had no idea up until that point that Lisp is a real, industrial-grade language (as opposed to a very interesting didactic tool). Even if you don't have an intention of programming in Lisp, you should read PCL for an idea of how much better the language you're programming in could be. Hopefully, it'll inspire you to write some Lisp, but even if it doesn't you'll be a better programmer for it. You'll be able to understand why static languages like Java have such arcane ecosystems; you'll be able to see how very little new there is under the sun.