I have always been intrigued by the LISP family of languages, partly because of the “code is data” philosophy, and partly because of the simple syntax. I read recently a lot of praise for a book used at the MIT to introduce programming using Scheme (a LISP dialect): SICP. This book is apparently best enjoyed by experienced programmers who want to go deeper into the basics of programming.
I have downloaded an ebook version of this book and will give it a try. I don’t really expect to have enough available time to be able to go very far, but the first chapter provides a different and interesting way to see programming through the functional approach. The language used (scheme) looks very clean.