Common Lisp and its extensive standard library are introduced in this book. The first chapter gives a short history of Lisp and its dialects. After a tutorial introduction in the second chapter, the author presents lists and trees, then covers recursion, local and global references, strings and characters, and streams.

Chapters 8 and 9 deal with lambda expressions, labels, and control structures. The next chapters treat debugging, macros, and structures. Chapter 13 introduces classes and objects. The last three chapters are about vectors and arrays, scope and eval, and efficiency and compilation.

Every chapter ends with an extensive set of exercises and a summary. Each exercise is marked with a number indicating its level of difficulty. Solutions to some of the exercises can be found in an appendix. Other appendices contain a comparison with C++, ASCII codes, references, and an index.

The author’s writing is witty. As a further recommendation, note that the text has been honed through extensive classroom experience. Still, on several occasions, concepts or properties are used before they are defined. A slight disadvantage is that the author tries to describe all the functions in the standard library. As a consequence, some parts of the text contain long lists of new functions with sample applications, which can be tedious reading.

Overall, the book is well suited for anyone who wants to program in Common Lisp. It is also well suited as a reference work on the language, thanks to the good index, although the definitive work on Common Lisp is obviously Steele [1].