Molly Miller and Eric Benson. Lisp: Style and Design. Digital Press. ISBN 978-0135384220. 1990.

A book that would serve as a primer for someone tackling a significant piece of programming for the first time.

The style is a bit stiff and occasionally slightly patronising, definitely positioned as being from senior to junior programmers. The depth of the material is variable: I found the treatment of macros quite superficial, not helped by the examples generating questionable code. It also places relatively little emphasis on CLOS and generic functions, which would get more space in a more modern treatment..

The best chapters are those on debugging and (especially) performance engineering, which dig into the interactive tools generally available within Lisp and give a good end-to-end description of the use of declare forms to aid compiler optimisations.

But again the book’s age shows. It predates the obsessive relationship that many modern programmers have with unit testing and test automation, treating testing as an interactive activity alongside debugging rather than as a core and permanent part of program development and maintenance.