Now available in paperback-
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.
Practical Common Lisp 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.