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.

Seibel, a programmer, covers syntax and semantics of Common Lisp and shows how to write software in this guide for programmers and students. Early chapters cover the language itself, and later practical chapters help readers write programs for filtering spam, parsing binary fields, cataloging MP3s, streaming MP3s over a network, and providing a Web interface for the MP3 catalog and server.
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...it has a fresh view on the language and the examples in the later chapters are usable in your day-to-day work as a programmer. — Frank Buss, Lisp Programmer and Slashdot Contributor

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 excellent 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.

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.

Chapter 1: Lather, Rinse, Repeat: A Tour of the REPL; Chapter 2: They Called It LISP for a Reason: List Processing; Chapter 3: Control Your Destiny: Conditionals and Iteration; Chapter 4: Advanced Control Flow; Chapter 5: Strings and Characters; Chapter 6: Up Scope! Variables in Lisp; Chapter 7: Putting the Fun in Functions; Chapter 8: Numbers and Math; Chapter 9: Not Just For Lists: Arrays, Sequences and Hashtables; Chapter 10: Talking to the Rest of the World: Streams; Chapter 11: The Programmable Programming