This article is an introduction to Emacs Lisp, a dialect of Lisp that is used as the extension language for Emacs, The One True Text Editor. Much of Emacs itself is written in Emacs Lisp, or Elisp as it is also called.
Some time back I gave a talk at my local LUG (http://www.chennailug.org) introducing the basic language features of Emacs Lisp. The material you are now looking at is derived from the notes I made for that talk. There are many manuals and howtos available, including those officially blessed by the FSF, but this tutorial presents the material differently from any document that exists today (to the best of my knowledge).
Just to reiterate, this tutorial deals only with the language aspects of Elisp. How this knowledge can be used to improve your Emacs experience is an altogether different topic; one that is dealt with in ``Introduction to Emacs Lisp '' and other works available from the FSF and other sources.
If you are using Emacs already, know a programming language or two, and would like to know the basic building blocks of Elisp in an effort to lay the foundation for a long term fruitful relationship with Emacs, this tutorial is for you. If you are completely new to programming this is not likely to be of any use to you. If you are already a proficient Lisp/Scheme hacker, you are unlikely to find much of value here. The audience in the aforementioned talk at my local LUG, for instance, had very little knowledge of Lisp or a Lisp-like language, but all had fair to good programming experience.
Please bear in mind that in the following pages, the emphasis is on simplicity. For e.g. discussion of macros is avoided till the end. The way things are presented here may not be the standard way of teaching Lisp of any kind. After all, I never learned Lisp formally myself. The idea is to be able to give the reader enough of a clue so you can can dig into the larger and more ``official'' documentation with greater ease.
There are likely mistakes of all kinds in the pages that follow. I would be happy to receive feedback that would enable me to fix such holes. And finally - for best results, please consume the contents the sections in order, and within 2 weeks of reading this first page.