This book shows software developers the powerful set of tools (CLOS) available for developing object-oriented programs in Common Lisp. The advantages of using CLOS to design, develop, maintain, and extend complex programs are many: it allows for modular implementation; programs more closely resemble what they model; programs are conveniently extensible; and CLOS defines conventions that will be shared across the Common Lisp community. CLOS has been adopted as part of Common Lisp by the X3J13 committee, which is working on creating the ANSI Standard Common Lisp. Common Lisp programmers can use this book to start developing object-oriented programs in Common Lisp as quickly as possible. Readers who are not familiar with Common Lisp can discover from this book the major themes of object-oriented programming.

The authors have all worked on Harlequin's Dylan product. Neal Feinberg manages the development of Harlequin's database technology. Sonya E. Keene, author of Object-Oriented Programming in Common Lisp (Addison Wesley Longman, 1989) is also involved in publishing large documents ont the World Wide Web. Robert O. Mathews was previously the OSF documentation project leader for Motif and DCE. P. Tucker Withington designs and develops automatic memory-management facilities for Dylan.