Practical Common Lisp

Treats LISP as a language for commercial applications, not a language for academic AI concerns. This could be considered to be a secondary text for the Lisp course that most schools teach . This would appeal to students who sat through a LISP course in college without quite getting it - so a "nostalgia" approach, as in "wow-lisp can be practical..."

Discusses the Lisp programming model and environment. Contains an introduction to the language and gives a thorough overview of all of Common Lisp's main features.

Designed for experienced programmers no matter what languages they may be coming from and written for a modern audience-programmers who are familiar with languages like Java, Python, and Perl.

Includes several examples of working code that actually does something useful like Web programming and database access.

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 shows 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.

Autorentext
Peter Seibel is a serious developer of long standing. In the early days of the Web, he hacked Perl for Mother Jones 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. He is the author of Practical Common LISP from Apress.

Inhalt
Introduction: Why Lisp?.- Lather, Rinse, Repeat: A Tour of the REPL.- Practical: A Simple Database.- Syntax and Semantics.- Functions.- Variables.- Macros: Standard Control Constructs.- Macros: Defining Your Own.- Practical: Building a Unit Test Framework.- Numbers, Characters, and Strings.- Collections.- They Called It LISP for a Reason: List Processing.- Beyond Lists: Other Uses for Cons Cells.- Files and File I/O.- Practical: A Portable Pathname Library.- Object Reorientation: Generic Functions.- Object Reorientation: Classes.- A Few FORMAT Recipes.- Beyond Exception Handling: Conditions and Restarts.- The Special Operators.- Programming in the Large: Packages and Symbols.- LOOP for Black Belts.- Practical: A Spam Filter.- Practical: Parsing Binary Files.- Practical: An ID3 Parser.- Practical: Web Programming with AllegroServe.- Practical: An MP3 Database.- Practical: A Shoutcast Server.- Practical: An MP3 Browser.- Practical: An HTML Generation Library, the Interpreter.- Practical: An HTML Generation Library, the Compiler.- Conclusion: What's Next?.