I plan to pick up the clojure language.
I have at my disposal an old book:
The Little Lisper
I know there are more recent versions of it (The Little Schemer) but I'm wondering if it will help ease me into picking up Clojure. Or should I find other learning resource ?
stop eating snacks for big meals. they are food to get between meals... :D
meaning, if you want clojure, go for that :
as for that book, i think that's like food for thought, when you want more insight into functional programmming
It will help you with every language and yes you get a feel of lisp witch will help you when you pick up Clojure. You could do the examples and then try to rewrite them in Clojure.
Having read "The Little Schemer" recently, yes, I definitely think you will get a lot from reading the book. What it teaches you is the recursive style of programming which is very prevalent in the Lisp world. The beauty of Lists is that it satisfies the closure property (not the Closure, the programming language concept, but Closure as in Mathematics where an operation on two elements from a set produces another unique element of the same set). The book teaches you all these advanced concepts without naming them and much more (for example, chapter 9 talks about Y Combinator, one of the most beautiful concepts in the Programming-Language/Logic theory).
I would suggest you to read it by all means, whether you learn Scheme or Clojure or any language.
There are more direct ways of easing yourself into Clojure and Clojure emphasized things like lazy sequences instead of recursion. When reading the little lisper be aware that Clojure has no tail recursion and does not really require it, so some of the recursive patterns in the book wont always work.
It may be more useful to start with clojure and then use the lisp literature to expand your view of the world once you have your foundations in place.
If you are looking to learn more about advanced lisp programming I would suggest On Lisp by Paul Graham. The tag line for the book is learning to write the kind of programs you could only write in lisp.
ps: it's free :)