How to go about learning Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp?

Question

The last few months I\'ve been using Emacs extensively as my main development environment and I\'ve now come to a point at which I\'d like to learn it\'s own Emacs Lisp to w

Answer 1

I'd recommend you to start with Common Lisp first since it's much more general purpose than Emacs Lisp. Once you're acquainted with Common Lisp you'll have very little trouble picking up Emacs Lisp(it's a much simpler dialect of Lisp).

You might as why I'm suggesting to start from the "more difficult" language of the two and you'd be right to ask such a question. The answer is fairly simply - much of the stuff in Emacs Lisp are fairly tied down to Emacs and you might be missing part of the big picture if you start from there.

I personally started my journey towards Lisp with the excellent book "Practical Common Lisp" which others have already recommended. It got me hook to the lisp vision and ideas and once I understood Common Lisp it was fairly easy for me to start writing Emacs Lisp code right away. I'm not sure the journey would be as smooth in the opposite direction, but everything is subjective and matter of personal preferences.