For a much smaller piece, this technical report contains a two-page compiler for a small Lisp to x86 assembly, from parsing to codegen, written as a series of Parsing Expression Grammar substitutions:

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2010003_PEG.pdf

I admit that it's probably not the best thing to learn from at first, but it's truly a thing of beauty.

For french speakers, there is a newer edition of that book which has never been translated to english. It is titled "Principes d'implantation de Scheme et Lisp" and is available here:

http://paracamplus.com/spip/?page=livre&isbn=978-2-916466-03...

I still remember when Amazon CA accidentally had this on sale for a pittance, then axed all the orders when people tried to buy it. Really should get a copy at some point.

Ha, they did cancel the orders ?

The fun of seeing a lisp book on amazon's best sellers all of a sudden.

ps: Highly valuable book, it's dense, theoretical but not too much, opens on a lot of other papers, and covers a large space about languages.

Yeah they cancelled my order. The price (of a few cents) had been assigned by a software error. Amazon was most apologetic for their inability to ship the item, and compensated me with a $10.00 voucher.

On a related note, I found a copy of Adele Goldberg's 'Smalltalk 80: The Language' in a junk shop for 50 cents. When I checked Amazon, the listed price was over five thousand dollars (due to automated bidding bots from rival booksellers).

I think a few orders actually shipped, but the impression I got was the vast majority got cancelled, and yeah I've only heard wonderful things about the book, I just need to decide to drop the cash on it.

Not just for learning lisp. This is must-read text for anyone developing interpreters or compilers development or implementing dynamic languages.