Customer Reviews

Concrete Abstractions: An Introduction to Computer Science Using Scheme

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4 star:		(1)
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Concrete Abstractions provides a great intoduction to the world of Computer Science. It covers well basic ideas of abstractions, software design, algorithms, sorting, and much more. Even after one gets a handle on the ideas presented, the book serves well as a handy reference. Very sound theory with challenging exercises. I recommend it to anyone studying computer science in a college environment. The only downside is that the book relies on the Scheme programming language; an obscure academic language. This isn't a large setback as the theory covered in the book is easily applied to all languages.

This is a great book. I don't like the way some subjects are presented (the chapter on memory and state for example), but this is just a matter of taste. The book is really good.

For people learning Scheme and functional programming it's worth having.
For anyone interested in Computer Science and programming, it's also great -- lots of concepts from CS are presented in a nice way.
The book follows the (very successful) approach by Abelson and Sussman: first comes pure functional programming, then there's abstraction of state.There are really good exercises, *all with connection to real world problems*.

Scheme has been taught to every student taking computer 'science' at MIT for the past 20 years, and it is increasingly used throughout the world to teach that subject. The mainstream languages C++ and Visual Basic are considered to be poorly designed, and C is too low level to be a good choice in a course intended to provide a comprehensive introduction to computer science (which goes far beyond what the average person calls 'programming').

Scheme is a variant of Lisp, which is the second oldest computer language, after Fortran. It is, however, a thoroughly modern language, and has strongly influenced the design of other modern languages like ML and Python.

The book starts in Scheme, then adds object oriented techniques and assembly language. It finishes with a transition to Java, which is, of course, similar to C++. This approach will provide a much broader background than a typical text using C++ or C could.