Emacs is popular. I like vim, but people are also using VS Code. https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/c

Emacs is popular. I like vim, but people are also using VS Code. https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... and other pages on the wiki may help you. https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#community https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#community has a list of community spots if you want to seek out other opinions. The SBCL implementation is very good, consider getting a binary directly from their site if your distro's version is out of date http://www.sbcl.org/ http://www.sbcl.org/ I disagree with a sibling comment that this book expects you to be comfortable with Lisp; the first chapter is literally an introduction, and the next two chapters cover most of the basics a working programmer should expect to cover quickly with chapter 3 being a handy reference to look back on for a lot of things. If you're new to programming or find the intro too fast, sure, look at other resources, but it's not too bad to just dive in. The main supplement is to figure out, with your editor of choice, how to send blocks of Lisp code to the Lisp prompt so that you can type and edit with an editor and not have to do everything directly on the prompt line.