The Little Schemer – 4th Edition by Daniel P. Friedman (PDF)

Description

The notion that “thinking about computing is one of the most exciting things the human mind can do” sets both The Little Schemer (formerly known as The Little LISPer) and its new companion volume, The Seasoned Schemer, apart from other books on LISP. The authors’ enthusiasm for their subject is compelling as they present abstract concepts in a humorous and easy-to-grasp fashion. Together, these books will open new doors of thought to anyone who wants to find out what computing is really about. The Little Schemer introduces computing as an extension of arithmetic and algebra; things that everyone studies in grade school and high school. It introduces programs as recursive functions and briefly discusses the limits of what computers can do. The authors use the programming language Scheme, and interesting foods to illustrate these abstract ideas. The Seasoned Schemer informs the reader about additional dimensions of computing: functions as values, change of state, and exceptional cases. The Little LISPer has been a popular introduction to LISP for many years. It had appeared in French and Japanese. The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer are worthy successors and will prove equally popular as textbooks for Scheme courses as well as companion texts for any complete introductory course in Computer Science.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Amazon.com Review 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. Review I learned more about LISP from this book than I have from any of the other LISP books I’ve read over the years…While other books will tell you the mechanics of LISP, they can leave you largely uninformed on the style of problem-solving for which LISP is optimized. The Little LISPer teaches you how to think in the LISP language…an inexpensive, enjoyable introduction.—Gregg Williams, Byte— From the Back Cover The notion that “thinking about computing is one of the most exciting things the human mind can do” sets both The Little Schemer (formerly known as The Little LISPer) and its new companion volume, The Seasoned Schemer, apart from other books on LISP. The authors’ enthusiasm for their subject is compelling as they present abstract concepts in a humorous and easy-to-grasp fashion. Together, these books will open new doors of thought to anyone who wants to find out what computing is really about. The Little Schemer introduces computing as an extension of arithmetic and algebra – things that everyone studies in grade school and high school. It introduces programs as recursive functions and briefly discusses the limits of what computers can do. The authors use the programming language Scheme and a menu of interesting foods to illustrate these abstract ideas. The Seasoned Schemer introduces the reader to additional dimensions of computing: functions as values, change of state, and exceptional cases. The Little LISPer has been a popular introduction to LISP for many years. It has appeared in French and Japanese. The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer are worthy successors and will prove equally popular as textbooks for Scheme courses as well as companion texts for any complete introductory course in Computer Science. About the Author Daniel P. Friedman is Professor of Computer Science in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University and is the author of many books published by the MIT Press, including The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer (with Matthias Felleisen); The Little Prover (with Carl Eastlund); and The Reasoned Schemer (with William E. Byrd, Oleg Kiselyov, and Jason Hemann).Matthias Felleisen is Trustee Professor in the College of Computer Science at Northeastern University. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Little Schemer is without a doubt one of the best books I have ever read on the subject of recursion, and what is interesting because they never really go into a formal definition of what recursion is, as most texts on computer science try to. Instead they show the reader time and time again what recursion is, while providing a great series of rules (commandments) on how to get the most out of recursion, particually in a tail-recursive language like Scheme.The book is structured as a series of questions and answers. Each page has several questions on the left hand side, with answers on the right hand side. The overall interpretation of the book is that you can read this without a computer, using pencil and paper to work through the many questions in the book.As the reader progresses they will continue to develop and reimplement many useful tools in Scheme that become more and more practical as the text goes on. What is great about this method is the pacing and the steady revealing of topics and good practices presented by the author. Because they gradually accustom the reader to topics like recursion, list operations, and lambda, by the time they show how define is unneccessary in Scheme due to the Y Combinator this rather challenging concept seems somewhat intuitive.Overall I think this is one of the greatest computer science books I have ever read. Sure it may not formally define things or be the absolute easiest text to read on the Scheme language itself, but this book should not be used as a reference product – it should be used as a tool bye which the reader strengthens their fundamentals in computer science and programmer, whether or not they ever touch Scheme again.

⭐This is a wonderful book for people who enjoy having their minds stretched. It starts from the most elementary concepts (this is a number, this is a symbol) and then proceeds to teach you how to program in scheme (a lisp dialect) using a question-and-answer approach, with the questions on the left hand side of the page and the answers on the right. Most of the teaching is by example; the authors show you something several times in several different guises in order to get you to understand the pattern underlying the programming examples. This form of teaching-by-pattern-recognition is especially useful for scheme, because lisp-based languages represent such a different paradigm from more conventional computer languages that it really helps to have the pattern in mind when you want to write a new function. The authors show how the basic elements of lisp (atoms, numbers and lists) can be used to solve an amazing variety of problems, many of which would be much harder (or impossible) in more conventional computer languages. Most of the book is so easy that a complete novice who had never programmed before could understand it, but the authors sneakily keep increasing the complexity until in the last three chapters they cover continuation-passing style, the applicative-order Y combinator (!) and writing a scheme interpreter in scheme (!!). Some of these topics would go over the head of most computer science Ph.D.’s (go ahead, ask one what the Y combinator is — I dare you!). This is not the book to read if you’re looking for a “teach yourself visual basic in 20 minutes” kind of book, but if you like programming and you enjoy having your mind stretched, you could not do better than this book (or its companion book, the Seasoned Schemer).

⭐This will remain on my shelf of favorites for a long time to come.As a reader you will quickly grasp the unique format of this book. It is light-hearted enough to remain unintimidating, but moves quickly enough to get across an impressive array of knowledge.As others have mentioned, recursive thinking is more demonstrated than directly taught, which I found very effective.The final chapters are mind bending and wonderful. It addresses monumental historical theories from Gödel, Turing, and Church while keeping its consistent, simple tone. Only after you’ve understood an idea fully is its historical significance revealed, and only tangentially to the subject matter at that!I commend the authors for their innovative teaching strategies. I was lucky to attend a Racket course overseen by Felleisen after reading this which was a wonderful experience.

⭐The first 80 pages of this book is spectacular. The instructions are clear. It walks you through the recursion step by step until you grasped all the essentials. But from Chapter 5 on, the book makes frequent to function definitions from earlier chapters. This is especially jarring when you have to look at the appendix to figure out where that function came from before being able to figure out the logical extension the current line is really about. At Chapter 8/9, the difficulty shoots up exponentially as it introduces currying and continuations. The book deliberately makes things more complicated by first showing you a function that makes no sense, then backtrack to an earlier example before showing you the same function again. At the point the book no longer does any step by step walkthrough to guide you over the difficult parts but expect you to make the logical leap (massive at this point) by yourself. Continuation especially should be much better explanations. Another problem in the later part of the book is it introduces functions without ever defining them.

⭐I just want to write and thank Bellwether Books for providing incredible value. The book was bought used, but I can’t imagine it was even ever opened. It’s effectively new or mint.Thank you for providing so much value to your customers. I’ll definitely buy used books from you again.

⭐The authors, with an eclectic conversational, question and answer style, with lots of pretty elephant drawings, teach you about functional programming (and programming in general) with Scheme (a simple flavour of Lisp).It gets heavy pretty quickly, so would recommend this in several sittings. Towards the end they are giving examples of continuation passing style, sophisticated meta-programming, the nature of computation, and the mind-blowing Y-combinator. It will give you an interesting perspective on programming and if you digest it all leave you pretty comfortable with recursion.

⭐What is the style of the book?Short questions followed by answers.Do you have to try to answer the questions before you read the answers?Not necessarily all the time, but it is important you understand each question and answer before proceeding, Some of the time I used a piece of paper to hide the answers. The book starts off slow, but gets very hard towards the end. If you lose the thread of the argument, you must backtrack and pick it up again.Is the book patronising?I can see that some people might find the question-answer style and the drawings of elephants irritating, but I find them charming.I want a manual on scheme. Is this the book for me?This is the right book for you to read, but it is not a manual on scheme.Who else ought to read the book?Anyone interested in programming, in any language. Anyone who likes to think hard.Who ought not to read the book?Anyone on a diet. (The authors are obsessed with food.) Anyone who does not relish a challenge.Is it the best book available on functional programming?I have not read all of them, so cannot say, but it is the best textbook I have read on any subject.

⭐Such a classic. It’s responsible for my career choices to date: I’m an engineer currently working with functional programming languages.

⭐perfect

⭐I’ve tried to read several introductions to functional programming books over the years, across several languages (Prolog, Haskell, Lisp), and with each book only after the first few chapters, I’ve found myself flipping tables and moving on because it just didn’t make any sense. However, after picking up this book up, for the first time, everything just fell into place! But not only did it click, it was slap-in-the-face obvious and left me feeling silly that I failed all those times before.Word of warning though… this was the first book that I’ve ever seen in the Q&A style. At first it was quite annoying and made me think why did they write it this way, this is childish. But now I think WOW every hard topic book should be written like this. It’s mindblowingly good. Don’t give up!!This book is highly entertaining and will get you programming functional in no time. Hats off to the authors!

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