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(More customer 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.
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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 ContributorIf you're 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.
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