Practical Common Lisp

"Practical Common Lisp", an introduction to Common Lisp by Peter Seibel, available on the web at http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ and also in dead-tree form from Apress.

It won a Productivity Award in the technical book category of the 2006 Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards.

If you are new to Common Lisp, a great way to quickly peek into this world, is to work through the first three chapters of this book. The book's website has a "lisp in a box" distribution ready for you and these chapters are completely online. Warning: Lisp is addictive and you may end up ordering this book after you have gotten your first dose. You have been warned.

Topics covered in this book

How do I install (and which) Lisp?
What does CL look like?
Walk me through several tutorials
Why is CL different?
What are these macros everyone is talking about?
How do I do normal modern programming tasks, like talking http or generating web pages?
How do I write portable cl code?
How do packages work?

Lisp in a box

Seibel has customized Matthew Danish and Mikel Evins' Lisp in a Box to give you a complete and standalone lisp environment. This includes pre-installed cl libraries such as cl-ppcre for Perl compatible regular expressions.

Once you start to gain some confidence with CL, you will want to install a fresh Common Lisp distribution, ASDF-INSTALL, etc. outside of the books LispBox. The books LispBox limits a few things to guarantee that the tutorials will all work with the book.

Document Education Online Tutorial

This page is linked from: CL-FAD document Getting Started Online Tutorial Peter Seibel The Proper Way to Do Things

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