Lately we exercised our Lisp skills by writing cl-torrents, an app that searches for torrents on several sources (the Pirate Bay through piratebay.to, Kickass torrents and torrent.cd), and we wrote an extensive tutorial in the making (that was actually our primary goal). It comes as a library to use from the REPL and as a self-contained executable (download and run, nothing more to install). You’ll find the following topics in the tutorial:

  • how to create and load a new project,
  • common pitfalls, basic data structures, useful libraries, where to find documentation,
  • (async) web scraping,
  • unit testing, with mocks,
  • continuous integration and delivery of executables (Gitlab CI, Docker),
  • parsing command line arguments,
  • building self-contained executables,
  • basics of error handling,
  • …

Some topics have been ported to the Cookbook, some not (yet).

The next iteration will be about a self-contained web app.