I’ve been meaning to read Practical Common Lisp for some time. Would you recommend this even for complete beginners to Lisp?

It’s a fine first book. I’d certainly recommend it.

I don’t recall if it has instructions on getting a dev env up and running, but if it does I imagine they’re out of date. Emacs with Sly or SLIME is what I’ve used, but I believe there are viable options for proper interactive development in vim and vs code among others.

If you just use a basic editor and paste code into a repl in a terminal you won’t be getting the experience most Lispers do.

Yes I would! I think it was the first complete book I read while learning CL.

I recommend the gentle introduction to Lisp book for the complete beginner.

The chapter on files in the Practical Common Lisp book wasn't complete enough for me to read a one line file of 800MB which is part of the Harvard Library Open Metadata archived set.

I'm assuming you mean Touretzky's Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation —

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/index.html

— which, yes, is a wonderful book for a complete beginner.

I read it around 10 years ago without knowing any lisp and got on ok.

Two prehensile toes up! ;)

That is THE book I would recommend for beginners.

Practical Common Lisp is a fantastic read, but Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation gets my vote as the best book for Common Lisp beginners. Working through it was a joy.