When it comes to expressiveness and consistency, Lisp still holds an edge over the mainstream languages of today. Add the open-source ecosystem of Common Lisp, free high-quality environments, their optimizing compilers and we land at a technology well-suited for the productive programmer looking for a new power tool.

The goal of this book is to identify the strengths of Lisp and what they can do for us. The book puts Lisp to work developing a web application. Starting from scratch, we'll develop a three-tier web application. I'll show how to:

utilize powerful open source libraries for expressing dynamic HTML5 and JavaScript in Lisp,

develop a small, embedded domain-specific language tailored for my application,

extend the typical development cycle by modifying code in a running system and execute code during compilation,

migrate from data structures in memory to persistent objects using a third party NoSQL database (MongoDB), and

finally show how we can execute a MapReduce algorithm on a remote database server without even leaving our Lisp environment.

I'll do this in a live system transparent to the users of the application. The idea is to convey a feeling of how it is to develop in Lisp rather than focusing on the details. In the process we'll find out how a 50 years old language can be so well-suited for modern web development and yes, it's related to all those parentheses. Now, download the book, get the source code and let's make programming just as fun as it always should be.