Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
This delightful book leads you through the basic elements of programming in Scheme (a Lisp dialect) via a series of dialogues with well-chosen questions and exercises. Besides teaching Scheme, The Little Schemer teaches the reader how to think about computation. The authors focus on ten essential concepts of thinking about how to compute and demonstrate how to apply these concepts in inventive ways. The Little Schemer is an excellent book both for the beginner and for the seasoned programmer.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
An interesting read
Customer Rating:
This book teaches in a Socratic method of asking questions and providing answers. It is very engaging and interesting way to learn. For me, it works -- this book has truly helped me learn recursion.
This book is pretty enjoyable to work your way through. Highly recommended.
The author appears not to give thought to the probability that each student has different levels or aspects of understanding, and forgets that nobody knows everything about any one thing. "Lambda", "cons", "car" and "cdr" are some of the many words that he uses and assumes everyone should understand
I highly recommend the book Programming & Meta-programming in Scheme to help explain the mathematics and vocabulary used in the Scheme language. I recommend this book especially to those that are perplexed by the text in The Little Schemer.
I could not finish this book.
Customer Rating:
Don't buy this book on recommendations. Thumb through it first. It's just a series of Q & A that beat you over the head with examples of recursion. If you already "get" recursion, it'll drive you insane after a chapter or two. Why this came so highly recommended, I'll never know.
Only Good as a Brain Puzzle
Customer Rating:
Anybody who tells you this is a good way to learn Scheme (or recursion) wants to cause you pain. Don't believe their lies!
Go learn the language (or how to use recursive techniques) somewhere else and come back to this once you have the basics if you want to get some practice thinking in the Scheme mindset.
In my opinion, a better way to practice would be to simply write some tools in Scheme than to waste your time banging your head against the wall trying to divine what this waste of paper is trying to teach you.
Build a Scheme Interpreter, but not realize it right away!
Customer Rating:
This book is excellent for explaining concepts of Scheme and Lisp. I highly recommend it for people that like logic puzzles and who are trying to uncover the Zen-like nature of programming in Scheme. This book emphasizes functional style by showing how many situations recursion applies to, and how you can use it to achieve various programming techniques (for example continuation-passing style).
Although this book is not a technical introduction to Scheme or Lisp, it does get very technical. The last few chapters introduce continuation-passing style, the Y operator, and building an interpreter. Earlier chapters focus on list processing and uncovering some basic computer science techniques (e.g. that fact that numbers in a machine are representations of the concepts we have for numbers).
This is a great book to read or skim any time, read with pencil and paper, or to actually code the examples. I've read it in various ways three times.
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