Practical Common Lisp is the best Common Lisp learning book there is. Land of Lisp is funny and all, but it doesn't make any attempt to really help you get set

Practical Common Lisp is the best Common Lisp learning book there is. Land of Lisp is funny and all, but it doesn't make any attempt to really help you get set up with practical tools for interacting, relies on CLISP which is buggy and slow, and is honestly a bit too in love with huge, complex nested data trees and car/cdr wizardry. PCL will teach you CL, how CL works, in clear language and examples. Ultimately, though, I realized I prefer the Scheme family (especially Racket). CL is crufty and arcane, and I prefer the Lisp-1 model (this does come at a cost to macro ease of use, but I'm not yet a huge macro fanatic, and once you learn the harder Scheme/Racket macros they can do insanely great things). For learning Scheme, SICP is the classic, and there's an interactive version of it. I also recommend the Little Schemer for getting yourself in the mindset of learning how to use recursion in clever ways. For Racket, the go to choices are Realm of Racket (which you can think of as a more clearly written Racket version of LoL but with a slightly less interactive approach), and How To Design Programs (which is quite a lot to get through, being designed as a full year course in CS).