Many of us already have at least a passing acquaintance with procedural languages such as BASIC or Pascal, but may not have met a functional language like Lisp before. Using the same enjoyable and sometimes quirky style that they employed so successfully in "The Art of C-Programming", Robin Jones and his team explain the fundamentals of Lisp in a way that students from school to postgraduates will find lucid and stimulating. The book is unique in illustrating the use of Lisp through the development of a realistic project: the design and implementation of a Lisp-based interpreter for the language ABC.

我们中的许多人至少对过程语言（如BASIC或Pascal）略知一二，但以前可能没有见过像Lisp这样的函数式语言。罗宾·琼斯（Robin Jones）和他的团队在《C语言编程的艺术》（the Art of C-Programming）中成功地运用了同样令人愉快、有时甚至古怪的风格，以一种从学校到研究生都会感到清晰和刺激的方式解释了Lisp的基本原理。本书通过一个现实项目的开发来说明Lisp的使用，该项目是独一无二的：设计和实现ABC语言的基于Lisp的解释器。