Lispbox-like emacs settings

I've just bought the dead-tree version of Practical Common Lisp and some time to go through it. To get started quickly, the author used to provide a "Lisp in a box" that isn't maintained any longer. There's a fork but it's broken on Linux x64 (it could probably be fixed but it's no quickstart).

I got SBCL, Emacs and Slime, what else a beginner reading Seibel's tutorial needs? From what I've read here Quicklisp and Paredit are recommended too? I'd like to keep things simple until I'm confortable with Lisp and Emacs. What's the easiest way?

>>5
I've read on the wiki that there's a trend to deprecate it in favor of Quicklisp, but it's still widely used and has may be has some other advantages(?)
Quicklisp is just a library manager, not your make/build system/etc. Quicklisp uses ASDF behind the scenes, and ASDF uses CL's package and compiler facilities behind the scenes. Confusing Quicklisp with ASDF is like confusing libraries (and their files) with packages (which are just a way of managing symbols).

To put it differently, I usually installed(svn/git/etc grab or untar/unzip/...) my libraries by myself or using asdf-install, QL just handles that for you like a package manager would do, but a package manager that builds from the source would still call make to actually build the binaries.