Land of Lisp

- Practical Common Lisp - Land of Lisp - http://landoflisp.com/ - watch the video, it's hilarious - Build Your Own Lisp - http://www.buildyourownlisp.com/ - Learn C by creating a lisp in C - In the spirit of making your own lisp, I would recommend https://github.com/kanaka/mal - learn any language, by making a lisp in that language

"Land of Lisp" by Conrad Barski: http://landoflisp.com Oh, and his Haskell tutorial seems fun as well: http://lisperati.com/haskell/hasktut.pdf

Maybe not best in the "build a project" genre, but about (Common) Lisp, you have Land of Lisp - in which you build several small games and sort of reuse some code between chapters, and Let Over Lambda, which does build its further code on top of earlier code, although it's more of an exercise in bending Lisp to your will than a well-defined project. I recommend both books; I found them very good.

I really enjoyed Land of Lisp http://landoflisp.com

Just a suggestion, but what about books which don't look at all technical but are full of cartoons and humour, eg "Land of Lisp" ( http://nostarch.com/lisp.htm ) , the Head First books and so on ? These might be acceptable. Secondly, one of the most common comments on HN is how few programmers are also any good at design, so perhaps books focused on design, usability and typography would be another option.

"Bridge of Birds" by Barry Hughart was great. It's a hilarious "detective" novel set in a fictional ancient China. One of the two main characters is an 80 year old sage with a drinking problem and the ability to con almost anybody. The pace never slows and it always has you wondering what'll happen next. Technically, I'd say "Land of Lisp" has been the most fun and the most rewarding.

In addition to what others have said, I would add The Little Schemer to the list. It may not seem like the most practical book, but it will make you a better programmer. Beyond that, I would reiterate the following suggestions put forth by others: -- How to Design Programs (get version 2. Racket, the IDE for this book, is practically plug-and-play, so you won't waste time prepping your development environment) -- Think Python by Allen Downey (i haven't read this one, but it comes very highly recommended. the excerpts I've read show that Allen communicates the concepts very clearly) -- Eloquent Javascript (very good introduction, all examples can be done directly in the browser with the specially-made console. This eliminates the time and confusion you will experience trying to set up a development environment with other languages.) On top of those I'd also add: -- The C Programming Language by K&R (if you are interested in C) -- Dive into HTML5 (if you are interested in web development. HTML is a markup language, but you are going to need it to be able to build web stuff. This book complements Eloquent Javascript nicely) -- Land of Lisp…