PAIP is absolutely great in terms of lessons for software engineering. i do not think you need to know lisp before hand in order to digest it. what's more you can now read it in nice markdown format [0]. however an even better solution, if you want to work through the book, is to convert markdown files to org documents [1] and enjoy the book interactively via org-babel [2]. for those unfamiliar, this is like having a book released as a jupyter notebook, except better. in any event if you are interested don't be afraid of lisp, it is a super-easy syntax to learn

[0] https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp

[1] https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/5465/how-to-migrat...

[2] https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html