Practical Common LISP

by Peter Seibel

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590592395
• ISBN13: 9781590592397
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Apress
• Length: 499 Pages
• Weight: 2.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 7.2" x 10.4"

Customer Reviews

Awesome

This book is a fantastic introduction to Common Lisp. Too many Lisp books you'll find are either a) incomplete (i.e. little to no discussion of macros or CLOS, two of the most powerful features of Lisp), or b) are written before 1990. Not so with Practical Common Lisp. The book opens up with an introduction to the language itself and then surveys major features of the language before going through a series of practical examples. The book really shines in its treatment of macros. Before reading PCL, I'd had a rough idea of what macros were and why they were cool, but no idea how to write them. Peter Seibel manages to explain in two chapters what took Paul Graham most of a book (On Lisp) to discuss. One of the later chapters describes Common Lisp's condition/restart system, which I had never heard of until reading this book. If you are unfamiliar with the condition/restart system, picture the try-throw-catch construct found in other languages, only with the ability to jump back to where the error was thrown and take a different code path. It is incredible that this system gets so little mention outside this book. The practicals it includes are also very cool. Seibel builds a simple test suite in one of the early chapters that is amazingly featureful yet incredibly concise. He builds an astonishingly small in-memory database in one of the earlier chapters with pretty advanced features. Two practicals toward the end involve building an HTML generation system and then using macros to optimize the generation. He includes a brief discussion of efficiency as well, describing how bottleneck functions can be tweaked for maximum efficiency and introduces some of the techinques that can bring Common Lisp applications to C-like efficiency. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to learn Common Lisp, or even just someone looking to see what all the hype is about. It provides a great survey of the language, lots of useful practicals, and is pretty handy as a reference as well. Buy this book!

"Practical" is the key.

There have been any number of excellent books written on Lisp and its sister, Scheme. "The Little Lisper" and "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" are two that come to mind. What most of them have in common is an emphasis on applying the powerful semantic features of Lisp to fundamental questions in computer science. This book does show that side of Lisp. However, its most important feature is in showing an underexposed side of common Lisp - that of a potent and underutilized tool for real world programming applications. File operations, XML and HTML output and web services are all covered. Constructs like the loop macro and package system are given extensive treatment. These were essential tools in the days when Lisp Machines roamed the earth. The unique power of the "defmacro" user defined macro facility is shown to good advantage. I am giving the author five stars for a comprehensive *practical* treatment. This book demonstrates that Lisp is as capable as the current breed of "dynamic" languages for application programming - while possessing unique functional powers that have yet to be equaled.

Best walkthrough of Lisp I've seen

Leaving aside the practicality of learning Lisp, this book is really amazing. I've read a couple of books on Lisp and never really gotten it until now. Generally they present some abstract math concepts, show how they work in Lisp and leave it there. This book takes it to the next level, the practical level, as you see in the title. Macros, slots, object orientation, data structures, and more, are all discussed in detail without 'leaving it to the reader' as the other books do. Finally! A good book on Lisp.

A wonderful (and fun) guide to Common Lisp

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.

The best way to learn Lisp

Lisp has a lot of things to teach us, and it's a very practical tool in its own right. It has all the features you're used to in other languages, usually done very well. There are plenty of good reasons to look seriously at Lisp, and Practical Common Lisp is the best introductory Lisp book out there. The things that most people don't see when they study Lisp are the interactive development style, macros, and practical applications. Peter Seibel gets you started off properly right from the start, walking you through picking a high-quality Lisp implementation and IDE, and then teaching you how to use it. This is one of the biggest things about Lisp: your program is running as you write it. You write and debug programs incrementally, and it feels good. After getting you started on the basics of using Lisp, Seibel plunges right into writing a simple CD database, with fast compiled queries that look almost like SQL in Lisp. After you learn more of the basics, Practical Common Lisp goes into the next big neglected topic in Lisp: macros. Ever practical, Seibel uses macros as part of a very pleasant unit testing framework that only takes up 26 lines of code, all of it easy to understand. Macros are a powerful tool, but easy to abuse. This book doesn't abuse them, and that rubs off on you. The next few chapters cover, clearly and completely, topics dear to the heart of every programmer: high-level data structures, file I/O, object-oriented programming, string processing, complex looping constructs, exceptionally powerful exception handling, and more. I use this book as a friendly reference; whenever I forget how to use something, I look it up here. From then on, the book is all practical examples. A spam filter, an object-oriented binary file parsing framework, an application of that binary file parsing framework to get ID3 information from MP3 files, and a lot of web programming. Practical Common Lisp is already the book universally recommended by the Lisp community for learning Lisp the right way. Read it, and you'll never program the same way again.