The Common Lisp Cookbook

ELS 2026, Kraków - European Lisp Symposium

Homepage for the European Lisp Symposium

Practical Common Lisp

This page, and the pages it links to, contain text of the Common Lisp book Practical Common Lisp published by Apress These pages now contain the final text as it appears in the book. If you find errors in these pages, please send email to book@gigamonkeys.com. These pages will remain online in perpetuity—I hope they will serve as a useful introduction to Common Lisp for folks who are curious about Lisp but maybe not yet curious enough to shell out big bucks for a dead-tree book and a good Common Lisp tutorial for folks who want to get down to real coding right away. However, don't let that stop you from buying the printed version available from Apress at your favorite local or online bookseller. For the complete bookstore browsing experience, you can read the letter to the reader that appears on the back cover of the treeware edition of the book.

Learn C • Build Your Own Lisp

If you're looking to learn C, or you've ever wondered how to build your own programming language, this is the book for you.

Using Lisp libraries from other programming languages - now with sbcl

Have you ever wanted to call into your Lisp library from C? Have you ever written your nice scientific application in Lisp, only to be requ...

Bringing Clojure programming to Enterprise

How a dialect of LISP can help developping modern enterprise applications

Idiomatic Lisp and the nbody benchmark

a personal blog

Practical: A Simple Database

Obviously, before you can start building real software in Lisp, you'll have to learn the language. But let's face it--you may be thinking, "'Practical Common Lisp,' isn't that an oxymoron? Why should you be expected to bother learning all the details of a language unless it's actually good for something you care about?" So I'll start by giving you a small example of what you can do with Common Lisp. In this chapter you'll write a simple database for keeping track of CDs. You'll use similar techniques in Chapter 27 when you build a database of MP3s for our streaming MP3 server. In fact, you could think of this as part of the MP3 software project--after all, in order to have a bunch of MP3s to listen to, it might be helpful to be able to keep track of which CDs you have and which ones you need to rip.

Karpathy's LLM Wiki: The Complete Guide to His Idea File

Karpathy's follow-up gist went viral. Complete breakdown with implementation examples.

Plain language guide series

A series of guides to help you understand and practice writing, designing, and testing plain language.

Patina: Turning Karpathy’s LLM Wiki Pattern into a Rust CLI

Useful, local, and slightly fun. There is a simple but important idea behind Andrej Karpathy’s LLM Wiki pattern: useful synthesis should not disappear into chat history.

Lisp Against the (LL)Machine

Every Lisp, Scheme, and Lisp-adjacent project listed is a non-toy implementation that is at least somewhat active. When I first wrote this article (2026-03-12), most Lisps did not have a policy or even public stance on LLM contributions. In such cases I posted to their bug trackers or discussion lists to ask. Most maintainers kindly responded.

Guides

Task-oriented walkthroughs of common use cases

Top (Modern Common Lisp with FSet)

Top (Modern Common Lisp with FSet)

The Coalton Programming Language

A statically typed, functional programming language that compiles to Common Lisp