Practical Common Lisp

If youre interested in Lisp as it relates to Python or Perl, and want to learn through doing rather than watching, Practical Common Lisp is an great entry point.

— Chris McAvoy, Chicago Python Users Group

Lisp is often thought of as an academic language, but it need not be. This is the first book that introduces Lisp as a language for the real world.

Practical Common Lisp presents a thorough introduction to Common Lisp, providing you with an overall understanding of the language features and how they work. Over a third of the book is devoted to practical examples such as the core of a spam filter and a web application for browsing MP3s and streaming them via the Shoutcast protocol to any standard MP3 client software (e.g., iTunes, XMMS, or WinAmp). In other "practical" chapters, author Peter Seibel demonstrates how to build a simple but flexible in-memory database, how to parse binary files, and how to build a unit test framework in 26 lines of code.

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Lisp is thought of an academic language but it need not be. This is the first book that introduces Lisp as a language for the real world.

Part I is the introduction to the Lisp language. The goal in Part I is to give the reader an overall understanding of the features of the language and a sufficiently robust understanding of how they work in order to prepare the reader for the practical code examples in Part II. Part I includes the case studies of the Franz Store, Viaweb, Pandorabots, and ASCENT.

Part II will show larger-scale examples of practical Lisp programming. The practical examples in this section are all centered around building a streaming mp3 server. By the end of the book, the reader will have code for a Lisp mp3 server that serves streaming mp3s via the Shoutcast protocol to any standard mp3 client software (e.g. iTunes, XMMS, or WinAmp). Siebel will show how to store metadata in both a simple home- brew sexp database as well as a relational database (MySQL). He will demonstrate how to use threads to support multiple simultaneous client connections. The server will advertise a Web Service (WSDL) interface and a Web Services programmer (i.e. anyone with Visual Studio .NET) can write an app to replace the browser-based interface.

Common Lisp: LISP, an acronym for list processing language was designed for easy manipulation of data. Developed in 1959 by John McCarthy, it is still the most commonly used language for artificial intelligence (AI) programming. It is one of the oldest programming languages still in relatively wide use and is widely taught in universities. LISP's ability to compute with symbolic expressions like those used in language processing makes it convenient for AI applications.

Reader Reviews
I've been recommending this text to people who want to start learning Common Lisp since it was first available in draft form on the author's web site. Now that it's out in print I can enthusiastically recommend that anybody who is interested in learning Common Lisp - or even curious about how the language can improve your productivity - purchase it. Peter has a very enjoyable and easy-to-understand writing style, and he starts early with practical examples that show how Common Lisp can be used to solved problems. Chapter 3, "A Simple Database", is a great explanation of how programs are grown from pieces in Common Lisp to solve large problems. It's presented early and draws people in to the problem solving techniques used when programming in Lisp. Peter doesn't skimp on details, though: detailed chapters on FORMAT (for formatted output), LOOP (for general iteration / value collection), and CLOS (the Common Lisp Object System) provide a wonderful tutorial to these powerful but complex features. The book ends with a long string of practical examples that synthesize multiple concepts into programs that are useful and show exactly why programming in Lisp is so cool. The last practical example, which builds a HTML generation library in Lisp, gives the reader a taste of why writing a Domain-Specific Language is so easy in Lisp and why it can integrate so well with the rest of the language. Peter is very enthusiastic about Common Lisp and it shows in his writing. Unlike other authors (Paul Graham comes to mind) he gives every major feature of the language its due and shows how and where it should be used. Practical Common Lisp may be one of the most fun books on programming you'll read all year. Even if you're just curious, check it out. It may change the way you program.