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A review by bramboomen
The Little Schemer, Fourth Edition by Matthias Felleisen, Daniel P. Friedman
4.0
After reading Gödel, Escher and Bach I was determined to learn a LISP, just because I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I won't bother anyone with the details, but arriving at Scheme was a struggle at best.
Being familiar with recursion for the most part on the Prolog and Haskell side of things I was a little hesitant to use this book as my introduction to scheme. And, sure enough, I blew through the first 6 chapters in a day. The second day, I decided that it would be useful to program all the things in parallel to the next chapters, which had me going back to previous chapters to write out these functions as well. This was very useful if only to get familiar with the syntax of Scheme.
Then, the final 3 chapters of the book broke my brain a little. I was not at all familiar with continuation so this was a struggle. Chapter 9 and 10 were very difficult, but also a lot of fun. I'm definately re-reading those in the near-future.
I don't know why, but the kiddy-style of the book and the unusual Q/A build kind of work very well and make it less textbook-y. It at least worked a lot better for me than the daunting "Practical Common LISP" (which is probably a very good programming-book, but which I found extremely boring).
Being familiar with recursion for the most part on the Prolog and Haskell side of things I was a little hesitant to use this book as my introduction to scheme. And, sure enough, I blew through the first 6 chapters in a day. The second day, I decided that it would be useful to program all the things in parallel to the next chapters, which had me going back to previous chapters to write out these functions as well. This was very useful if only to get familiar with the syntax of Scheme.
Then, the final 3 chapters of the book broke my brain a little. I was not at all familiar with continuation so this was a struggle. Chapter 9 and 10 were very difficult, but also a lot of fun. I'm definately re-reading those in the near-future.
I don't know why, but the kiddy-style of the book and the unusual Q/A build kind of work very well and make it less textbook-y. It at least worked a lot better for me than the daunting "Practical Common LISP" (which is probably a very good programming-book, but which I found extremely boring).