Edmund Weitz is well-known in the Common Lisp community for his open-source libraries and for being one of the organizers of the European Common Lisp Meeting. He has a Ph.D. in mathematics and has been a free-lance Common Lisp consultant for clients in the US, Europe, and Asia since 2002. He now works as a professor for math and computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, Germany.

Common Lisp Recipes is a collection of solutions to problems and answers to questions you are likely to encounter when writing real-world applications in Common Lisp. Written by an author who has used Common Lisp in many successful commercial projects over more than a decade, this book is the first Common Lisp book which covers areas as diverse as web programming, databases, graphical user interfaces, communication with other programming languages, multi-processing, and mobile devices as well as debugging techniques and optimization, to name just a few. It is organized around specific problems or questions each followed by ready-to-use example solutions and clear explanations of the concepts involved, plus pointers to alternatives and more information. Each recipe can be read independently of the others and thus the book will hopefully earn a special place on your bookshelf as a reference work you always want to have within reach. Common Lisp Recipes is aimed at programmers who are already familiar with Common Lisp to a certain extent but do not yet have the experience you typically only get from years of hacking in a specific computer language. It is written in a style that mixes hands-on no-frills pragmatism with precise information and prudent mentorship. If you feel attracted to Common Lisp's mix of breathtaking features and down-to-earth utilitarianism, you'll also like this book.