Excellent Lisp book, but not your first one
This is an excellent book for someone who already knows the basics of Lisp.
The book is mostly about Lisp macros, showing several interesting examples of use.
The renowned programmer Eric Raymond once said that even if you don't have plans to use Lisp in the future, it is still worth learning because it would "make you a better programmer for the rest of your days". Macros are one of the several features that make Lisp a powerful language. Unlike C macros, which are basically a form of controlled text substitution, Lisp macros allow the programmer to actually run Lisp code at compile (or "evaluation") time, then generate the Lisp code that will actually be executed. This makes possible several techniques to speed up development and improve the readability of a program.
If you are new to Lisp, get started with another book (Peter Seibel's "Practical Common Lisp" and David Touretzky's "A gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation" are excellent), and then move on to this one. The time you spend on this book will not be wasted.
The author is well-known for having build a very successful web business which survived the dot-com bubble and was bought by a large company, and he did that using Lisp, so you will be geting advice from an expert who has actually used Lisp for a real-world application. His code and advice are very good.
