Product Details
Practical Common Lisp

Practical Common Lisp
By Peter Seibel

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Product Description

...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.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #26113 in Books
  • Published on: 2005-04-11
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 500 pages

Editorial Reviews

About the Author
Peter Seibel is a serious developer of long standing. In the early days of the web, he hacked Perl for Mother Jones Magazine and Organic Online. He participated in the Java revolution as an early employee at WebLogic which, after its acquisition by BEA, became the cornerstone of the latter's rapid growth in the J2EE sphere. He has also taught Java programming at UC Berkeley Extension.

Customer Reviews

wordy though useful and expansive5
Describes macros well, has plenty of examples and very well written text, very well thought out text. This and ANSI Common Lisp complement one another very well. (I've heard Norvig's book is highly touted too, though I've not seen it in real life.)

Quite Possibly the Best Language Tutorial Ever Written5
I've studied a number of (computer) languages over the years, but one that I've never spent the time to really learn was Lisp. So, sitting down with this book one long weekend, I decided to give it a shot. What I found -- besides the fact that Lisp is a fascinating language that incorporates so many ideas that are only beginning to be incorporated in more "modern" languages -- is that Peter Seibel has written one of the best language tutorials that I have ever used. His style is conversational and clear, with the information broken up into easily digestible chunks. You may start this book thinking Lisp is just a hard-to-read language with too many parenthesis, but you will finish it with a new view of how computer languages should really work.

Very helpful and practical5
I found this to be an excellent book. Very helpful and practical. I found it complemented nicely the more theoretical "ANSI Common Lisp" book by Paul Graham.