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Practical Common Lisp (Hardcover)

~ Peter Seibel (Author)
Key Phrases: parsing binary files, pathname abstraction, slot specifier, Common Lisp, Dixie Chicks, Byla Cesta (more...)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
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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. If you're interested in Lisp as it relates to Python or Perl, and want to learn through doing rather than watching, <i>Practical Common Lisp</i> is an excellent entry point.</a></p> </blockquote> <p id="quoteAuthor">&#8212; Chris McAvoy, Chicago Python Users Group</p></div>

<p>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. </p>

<p><i>Practical Common Lisp</i> 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.</p>

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.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 500 pages
  • Publisher: Apress; 1st ed. 2005. Corr. 3rd printing edition (April 11, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1590592395
  • ISBN-13: 978-1590592397
  • Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.2 x 1.4 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #78,886 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
parsing binary files, pathname abstraction, slot specifier, format nil, defun foo, recycling version, msec user, macro expansion time, playlist object, var start end, macro parameter lists, lisp reader, standard control constructs, standard method combination, class precedence list, resizable vector, fill pointer, cons cells, slots superclasses, pathname library, defun add, colon modifier, lisp forms, condition handler, recycling functions
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Common Lisp, Dixie Chicks, Byla Cesta, Kathy Mattea, Done Figure, Prentice Hall, Green Day, Sally Sue, John Doe, Computer Programming, Lyle Lovett, Lisp Machines, Spoon Boy, Bertrand Meyer, Donald Knuth, Third Edition, Guy Steele, Byte Order Mark
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Customer Reviews

57 Reviews
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90 of 96 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful (and fun) guide to Common Lisp, April 8, 2005
By B. Mastenbrook (Schaumburg, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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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42 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Solid introduction, April 16, 2005
Practical Common Lisp is a solid introductory text to Common Lisp for people with previous programming experience, and is sufficiently no-nonsense that even relatively experienced lisp programmers will benefit from it.

Having been exposed to people with no lisp experience who have started learning it from this book, most seem to manage well. Common problems stem from jumping too far ahead: unlike many books who claim to do so, PCL actually has a very nice didactic approach to most things, and benefits from being read in order.

I have very few grivances with the book:

1. I believe that package and symbol semantics could benefit from a thorough treatment earlier in the book -- say around chapter 6, as opposed to being left for chapter 22.

2. While Seibel's style is refreshingly idiomatic[1], he consistently uses Javaesque dotted.package.names, which while not by any means unique to him I still find irritating. Most of the package names in the book are prefixed with com.gigamonkeys, whereas the more traditional approach would be to leave the prefix out totally, or make it com-gigamonkeys.

3. Optimizing lisp code is admittedly a tough topic to deal with, especially when aspiring to give portable advice. The treament given is nonetheless too cursory for my liking. Norvig's advice in "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" is far superior, but could still have been improved upon.

These nits aside, I must say that this is definitely a book I wish I'd had when I was learning CL. Recommended to anyone interested in learning Common Lisp.

[1] Some well-known authors of Common Lisp textbooks *cough* Graham *cough* have unfotunately quirky personal styles of writing code that do not mesh that well with what many consider idiomatic lisp. In comparison to this Mr. Seibel's style is clear and provides a good model to emulate.
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Extremely well written -- now, watch out for the index!, August 28, 2005
By Rachel Grey (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Peter Seibel's writing style is a joy to read, and (unlike other commenters) I find his footnotes quite useful. Concepts are introduced in a natural and general intuitive ordering, and in general this is a great book for the first-time learner of Lisp.

Now -- WATCH OUT FOR THE INDEX! My first indication that the index of this book was not up to par was an especially useful footnote on page 58 mentioning READ-FROM-STRING, which I couldn't find later when I needed to use READ-FROM-STRING in the small Lisp program I'm writing. A little experimentation convinced me that nothing in the footnotes is listed in the index, and I started reading with a pencil in my hand.

Unfortunately, the index fails in more fundamental ways as well. It would have you believe that the "do" keyword is introduced on page 278, when in fact an entire subsection is devoted to "do" in pages 85-87. If you look up "comment" you'll find no mention of page 49, where comment conventions for block comments, line comments and so forth are described in concise and useful detail. The long list of special characters that stars the alphabet is inexplicably lacking some of the most common operators and directives, such as #', ,@ , ,@ and #. In fact, the only thing the index seems consistently to get right are words that appear in all capital letters in the body of the text.

It slows my reading considerably to constantly be adding pencilled entries to the index, but since it will probably save hours of irritated searching for information in the future, I'm persisting. Let's all hope this glaring flaw is corrected soon in a second edition. In the meantime, there's always the option of searching the full text, which is online on the gigamonkeys site, every time you would normally flip to the index.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book
First, these are my credentials as a reviewer. I have read this entire book (some parts more than once). Read more
Published 1 month ago by blueduck

5.0 out of 5 stars great to work thru with allegro express
bought this about 4 years ago, got about half way thru, and then got too busy. Also, either I'd missed it, or Allegro didn't have a free 'express' edition then. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Daniel G. Wasson

5.0 out of 5 stars A great introduction to Lisp
This book is a great way to get to know lisp. It doesn't assume you know anything, but it moves along quickly. This isn't lisp for idiots. Read more
Published 4 months ago by A. Robbins

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book
This book is essential reading when you get started in lisp. I use it as a reference all the time. More often than not my Google searches lead back to this book. Thank you Peter.
Published 5 months ago by Jim McDonald

5.0 out of 5 stars Good text on Common LISP
The book discusses essentially all of the salient features of Common LISP in an accessible manner. A nice text to read for an AI researcher who has been for some years "away"... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Antti Juhani Ylikoski

5.0 out of 5 stars The best way to learn how to do real programming in Common Lisp
At my workplace, we use Common Lisp (among other languages) very heavily. When we hire new programmers who haven't used Common Lisp before, we give them "Practical Common Lisp",... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Daniel Weinreb

1.0 out of 5 stars Learn by example....
This is "learn by example" book. You can learn a lot of stuff using this paradigm, but definitely NOT sophisticated programming language. Read more
Published 8 months ago by lew

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good, but some things could have been done better
With all of the choices available, why would anyone want to learn about such an "old" language?

Paul Graham's, lisp developer, and venture capitalist, wrote numerous... Read more
Published 10 months ago by Rob Ryley

5.0 out of 5 stars A most excellent book on Lisp!
I like this book a lot. I think it nicely complements Paul Graham's "ANSI Common Lisp" book.
Published 11 months ago by Paul Douglas Reiners

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect companion to Lispworks LISP IDE for Windows
I read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) when it was first published. This inspired me to learn LISP (at least to the extent that was needed to understand... Read more
Published 16 months ago by S. Hemingway

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