Lisp Outside the Box

I'm writing a book about Lisp and O'Reilly is going to publish it.

The aim is to show people who suspected that Lisp was dead because it couldn't look outside the box, along with those who hoped it could but didn't know how, that the going isn't all that hard. Although the book will introduce Common Lisp from scratch and give generous treatment to those features which make the language great, it isn't going to cover the whole thing or anything like it. I want to make Lisp look easy and steer the novice away from the more complex edge cases.

The core of the book will be a number of in-depth examples which between them will thoroughly address the use of libraries whether or not these were written in Lisp. It'll also go into common, important utilities for dealing with persistence, threading, GUIs, system building and more. Examples will include: an end-user desktop application, a web server, and an introduction to getting Lisp working on a mobile phone.

Eight chapters form the middle of the book are now ready for public consumption and I have posted them here. As the book comes together I'll continue to post more of them, and each time I do that I'll drop a note to my blog (mirrored on Planet Lisp).