Comment by sross

I picked up the language after running sawfish as a window manager. This took me to emacs and from there to Common Lisp. I can highly reommend 'A Gentle Introduction To Symbolic Computation' if you are new to programming and 'Practical Common Lisp' if you aren't new to this field. If you follow that up with 'On Lisp' and (optionally) 'Lisp In Small Pieces' you cant go wrong.