It offers a novel perspective on the language, and the examples in the later chapters can be applied to your regular programming tasks.
Practical Common Lisp is a great place to start if you're interested in Lisp as it pertains to Python or Perl and want to learn by doing rather than by watching.
Although Lisp is frequently considered an academic language, this is not necessary. This is the first book that introduces Lisp as a language for the real world.
With its thorough introduction to Common Lisp, Practical Common Lisp gives you a complete understanding of the language's features and how they operate. Practical examples such as the spam filter's core and a web application for browsing MP3s and streaming them using the Shoutcast protocol to any common MP3 client software take up more than a third of the book (e.g., iTunes, XMMS, or WinAmp). Other "practical" chapters by author Peter Seibel show how to analyze binary files, create a unit test framework in 26 lines of code, and create an easy-to-use in-memory database.
