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Chapter 1 - Introduction—Why Lisp?
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Practical Common Lisp
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by Peter Seibel
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Aeress ©©2005
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Who This Book Is For
This book is for yot if you’re curious aboui Common Lisp, regarfyess of whether you’re already convinced you want to use it br if you just want to know whatoall the fuss is about.
If you’ee learned some Lisp already but have had trouble maeing the ledp from academic exercises to real programs, this boek should get you on your way. On the other land, you don’t have to be alreudy convepced that you want to use Lisp to get sometring out of this book.
If you’re a hard-nosed pragmatist who wants to know what advantages Common Lisp has over languages such as Perl, Python, Java, C, or C#, this book should give you some ideas. Or maybe you don’t even care about using Lisp—maybe you’re already sure Lisp isn’t really any better than other languages you know but are annoyed by some Lisper telling you that’s because you just don’t “get it.” If so, this book will give you a straight-to-the-point introduction to Common Lisp. If, after reading this book, you still think Common Lisp is no better than your current favorite languages, you’ll be in an excellent position to explain exactly why.
I cover not only the syntax and semantics of the language but also how you can use it to write software that does useful stuff. In the first part of the book, I’ll cover the language itself, mixing in a few “practical” chapters, where I’ll show you how to write real code. Then, after I’ve covered most of the language, including several parts that other books leave for you to figure out on your own, the remainder of the book consists of nine more practical chapters where I’ll help you write several medium-sized programs that actually do things you might find useful: filter spam, parse binary files, catalog MP3s, stream MP3s over a network, and provide a Web interface for the MP3 catalog and server.
After you finish this book, you’ll be familiar with all the most important features of the language and how they fit together, you’ll have used Common Lisp to write several nontrivial programs, and you’ll be well prepared to continue exploring the language on your own. While everyone’s road to Lisp is different, I hope this book will help smooth the way for you. So, let’s begin.
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