For learning Common Lisp (which is what I’d recommend) there are: * Practical Common Lisp by Peter Sibel. An award-winning book that serves as a serious introd

For learning Common Lisp (which is what I’d recommend) there are: * Practical Common Lisp by Peter Sibel. An award-winning book that serves as a serious introduction to the language with many practical projects. [Available to read for free online.](http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/) * Land of Lisp By Conrad Barski. A fun introduction involving writing silly retro games in Lisp. The author based his book of a short introduction he wrote called [Casting SPELs in Lisp](http://www.lisperati.com/casting.html http://www.lisperati.com/casting.html) As an IDE if you’re comfortable with Emacs use Sly, Vim use SLIMV. For Atom there’s SLIMA, a port of Sly should become available for Sublime Text in a month’s time (or whenever ST4 is announced). The reason I recommend Common Lisp is because it’s multi-paradigm, unlike Clojure and Scheme which force you down the functional rabbit-hole (not a bad thing but you won’t learn as much). Another reason is with the tools above it’s very-easy to setup a live coding environment. I would recommend against learning Clojure because the error messages often tie too closely to the JVM, which might be annoying. In terms of big projects, there’s of course HN, also * Emacs * Google Flights * Grammarly * Some quantum computing stuff One of the things which is easier in Lisp is the creation of a Domain-Specific-Languages Look at how [messy and hacky HTML DSL in Python is](https://github.com/duyixian1234/html_dsl https://github.com/duyixian1234/html_dsl), implementing this in Lisp would’ve been far easier and less hacky than that. But really the main thing is macros (which enable the above), macros allow for easy customisation of the language syntax to better suit the problem at hand.