Course Overview

What this Common Lisp Programming course covers, how to use it, prerequisites.

A structured, hands-on course on Common Lisp, the ANSI-standardized, multi-paradigm, industrial-strength member of the Lisp family. It runs from your first REPL session to lists, sequences, hash tables and structures, functions and closures, the loop macro, format, macros and reader macros, packages and symbols, CLOS (multiple dispatch, method combination, the MOP), the condition system with restarts, streams and files, type declarations and performance tuning, ASDF and Quicklisp, threads, the CFFI, web development, testing, debugging, building executables, and production practices.

Targets the ANSI Common Lisp standard with SBCL as the reference implementation (notes for CCL, ECL, ABCL, LispWorks, Allegro). For a broader tour of the Lisp family (Scheme, Clojure, Emacs Lisp, building your own Lisp), see the companion Lisp course on this site.

Course Overview

Beginners, developers from other languages, Lisp-curious programmers, those building long-lived or high-performance systems

Basic programming familiarity helps; no Lisp experience needed ~90–110 hours (self-paced), 12–13 weeks

SBCL, Quicklisp (or ocicl/Qlot), Emacs + SLIME or Sly (or Portacle, VS Code + Alive, Lem, LispWorks Personal)

REPL experiments, Exercism Common Lisp track, Project Euler, Advent of Code, the Common Lisp Cookbook exercises

Foundations → Data Structures → Control & FP → Macros → Systems & Packages → CLOS → Conditions → Performance & Interop → Practical → Production
(1–8)         (9–15)            (16–21)        (22–25)  (26–29)              (30–35) (36–38)      (39–43)                (44–49)     (50–55)