Appearance
The Little Schemer - 4th Edition
Explains ONLY what is needed, like flash cards. The PERFECT way to teach.I have made more progress from this one book then any other book by far and have had the most fun doing it.This book answers the HOW and WHY to your WHAT?I'm about 1/3 through and already feel much stronger with Python.(Personally, I read the e-book and resize the window so that I can only see one question at a time. I answer the question then scroll over to the answer.)Good luck and happy cramming!
The Little Schemer - 4th Edition
Reading this book is a great way to learn recursion and the basics of working with list processing languages such as Scheme. I can think of no better material for quickly picking up on the patterns of processing data and the organization thereof. As with any treatment of LISP like languages the book concludes with implementing Scheme using Scheme. This makes the final chapters more harry than the initial 75%, but by this point you are already engaged enough to use the constructs of the language to tackle most tasks. Finally, it is certainly a treat to build in less than 200 pages the entire workings of a language used to tackle artificial intelligence. Perfect for mathematically inclined people.
The Little Schemer - 4th Edition
This book provides a complete tutorial from the basics of Scheme and list processing to eventually having you build another copy of the scheme interpreter that you are running your program at. By the end of the book you understand how and why scheme runs your programs, including recursion, function definition, and evaluation of expressions.I cant wait to read the rest of the series.
The Little Schemer - 4th Edition
If you are looking for a language reference, you will be sorely disappointed with this book. It's not designed for quickly looking things up. However, if you are looking to an easy, painless introduction to functional programming, this is the book you want. The exercises are simple, build carefully on one another, and the theory behind them is explained at every step of the book. The presentation is charming, from the peanut butter and jelly theme throughout the examples, to the cavorting elephants on the cover. Pick this book up as a supplement to the mandatory, dry, exhaustive language reference, and work through the examples a few at a time. You'll find yourself understanding the language much better.
The Little Schemer - 4th Edition
The negative reviews almost uniformly make the claim that this book was written to learn a language (LISP, Scheme, etc). It is not. These are playful exercises to get you to think about recursion.It is goofy in its approach. It will make you think perhaps of Dr Seuss, Babar or other ludic approaches in the UNIX or Lisp world. I am thinking of things like the UNIX koans, the April's Fools Day RFCs, "Land of Lisp" (which actually teaches you CL).What is remarkable about this book?One thing is that you do not need a computer. There is a kind of Socratic discourse in which you incrementally build on simple ideas about lists and their manipulations. I believe this is a good exercise for students - thinking about fundamental CS ideas without turning one on.Another thing is that this was originally written in the '70s and is still good. Like "Kernighan and Ritchie"'s C Programming Book this has a continual relevance.The bad reviews of this misunderstand the book's point. Don't read this to learn a language. Get this book and read it (my copy is less than 100 pages long) and learn a bit from it. In time you will pull it down again and get something else from it. If some of the terminology is obscure - find defs on the intrenet (car and cdr are two examples).You do not need a computer nor do you need to already know a language. If you open your mind to it you will come away with something of value.
The Little Schemer - 4th Edition
I am using Java as my main programming language and I've been recently thinking of learning some new JVM language. I was thinking of Clojure (since it sounds more crazy than Groovy or Scala), but then colleague of mine recommended me to learn how to think recursively first. I was surprised when he recommended me a book that is older than me (well, the first edition was at least).Let me tell you that this was an excellent choice. The book was shocking from the very first pages. It is written in rare "Question-Answer" style that doesn't directly show you any definitions, but just examples. It is up to you to figure it out, what the formal definition is (if you care).For example, the first thing in the book is something like this:Q: "Is it true, that atom is an atom?"A: "Yes."More important thing is, that this teaches you how to think recursively and illustrates it by using a lot of samples all over the book. You don't need no IDE, no compiler, no nothing. Just an text editor and this book.It is easy to spot how elegant some thing are in this functional recursive way and maybe it is sad that some things are too procedural in the todays world of programming. But don't expect anything easy! Roughly from the second part of this book it's getting quite hard and it'll fairly exercise your very brain capabilities.Even though Little Schemer is not going to change most of the code I write on daily basis, it had altered my thinking and it had overally expanded my knowledge as a programmer.