Regarding 4, I'd suggest reading Object-Oriented Programming: The CLOS Perspective first. It also has a great cover (same illustrator as AMOP), though it's not

Regarding 4, I'd suggest reading Object-Oriented Programming: The CLOS Perspective first. It also has a great cover (same illustrator as AMOP), though it's not evident from Amazon's page last time I checked. This book is really a big collection of papers from several authors. It covers the topics of Lisp's OOP system and some of its history, its unique features (especially some comparison chapters with C++, Smalltalk, Eiffel), its meta-object protocol (and why you'd want it), some production reports from the field on its use in helping application development, and some implementation details to ward off "surely this is sooo much slower than a plain old function call?"