Lisp Community - Quality tutorials/resources

Question

As many other people interested in learning Lisp, I feel the resources available are not the best for beginners and eventually prevent many new people from learning it. Do you feel it could be created some sort of community, with a website, forum or something, that provides good (as in quality) resources/tutorials, for Lisp users, possibly translated to several idioms? That way beginners that don't have the necessary skills for writing tutorials could help translating them. Is it a bad idea or is it something that could be accomplished? Give me some feedback or flame me :D

Answer 1

Actually, there are quite a few free CL books available online:

"Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation" covers the basics, but might be too gentle, depending on your level.

"Successful Lisp" is quite comprehensive, and IMHO the best online resource for learning CL, if you have already programmed a little in another language.

"Practical Common Lisp" aims to reach experienced programmers and surely is one of the best Lisp books available -- one of the few which explicitly try to explain "real world usage".

"On Lisp" is an interesting read for advanced CL programmers, mostly covering macros.

Besides those, there is the indispensable Hyperspec, a htmlized version of the standard, and CLtL2, which is was the pre-ANSI de facto standard (still valuable, since many people find it more accessible than the Hyperspec. At least it sometimes shows things from another perspective).

Finally, there is the Lisp Forum and c.l.lisp. Though there is much noise on c.l.l., you can get very insightful answers there and learn from the masters. As a newbie, one should try to post thoughtful questions on c.l.l., and have a thick skin.