Customer Reviews

The Scheme Programming Language

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an excellent book on Scheme, that covers R5RS thoroughly. The first part is a succint tutorial, most useful for those of us with no previous knowledge of functional programming: manipulation of lists, continuations, macros, etc. It is very clear, with plenty of solved examples and exercises. The second part is a thorough reference on every keyword and function of R5RS. There is nary a reference to particular implementations of Scheme, so it should be useful to everybody.

This is a dry book. I say this to its advantage. There are no extraneous comments nor attempts at being funny, yet the text is perfectly readable.

Typography is the truly standard TeX fare, and it looks very nice and 'functional'. Format is a bit wide, which helps the book to stay open where one leaves it open.

Many useful quasi-standard features outside R5RS (ie the SRFI's) are not covered. But for learning and practicing the language itself, I doubt there is a better choice. On the other hand, the full text of the book (and a handful of errata) is available online, should you not believe me (...)

As I said in a past review to the second edition, this book is wonderful. This book has convinced me to migrate from Common Lisp to Scheme. This is a serious book for the one that really wants to learn about Scheme and require careful study and a strong motivation. Please note: if you are really interested to learn Scheme, then this book is for you; if you are not really interested and/or you like to joke, this book is absolutely not for you. The book is accurate, complete, well written and cover all you need about the modern Scheme. I use Scheme for personal study about bioinformatics. Thanks to the Autor.

I purchased this book specifically with a view to learning the Scheme language. The text is easy to read, is pithy and to the point, and generally makes concepts clear and easy to understand. There are however, in my opinion, some sections where the author forgets that concepts are new to the reader and the examples that are used tend to obfuscate the point being made rather than elucidating it.

I have never considered myself stupid, but after my 5th reading of the introduction to continuations I was beginning to worry. A quick reading of another text on the subject cleared up my concerns almost immediately which suggests to me that the explanations are not as clear as they could be. There are some other areas of the book where this sort of assumption makes grasping a new concept more difficult than it should be.

Nonetheless, I still consider this a good introduction to the Scheme language and would gladly recommend it to the aspirant Schemer.

I'm a fan of a lot of the popular Scheme or Scheme related books (SICP, The Little Schemer, The Seasoned Schemer). While in some sense this book takes a more pragmatic approach than the aforementioned books, it is no less valuable. I found this book helpful as a teaching aid while learning Scheme, and as a reference for my continued use of the language.

Advanced topics, such as continuations and the syntax-rules and syntax-case macro systems, get good treatment from this book.

Highly recommended.

Clear, to the point, nice exercises, does not put on airs. Other "Scheme books" are really about something else. Eg, SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - 2nd Edition (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)) is an introduction to programming, which uses the "scheme machine" as the virtual hardware, and is not really a good introduction to the language (at MIT this was done in tutorials and through self-study). Various "Schemer" books (eg, The Little Schemer - 4th Edition) are more collections of puzzles, which I, personally, find rather annoying, since the authors DO tend to put on airs -- Scheme is just a programming language, don't make it sound like you are giving the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis.

Great text for learning scheme. I got into Scheme first because I heard it's more minimal than Common Lisp. Scheme was developed at MIT's AI lab and this book is published by MIT press, so I would trust this book.

I think the book is not useful as a first book for learning the Scheme language, instead it is very important as a reference. I don't open it very often, but when I need to know something about the language, I do it because I a can find the answer.

Very good book for learning. You can follow many examples with a running Scheme interpreter; I recommend it as a must.

The book is written like any technical book ought to be : with a good amount of details but without futile digressions.
That is how the book manage to cover everything from syntax to standard library, finishing with some examples that are idiomatic, simple to follow yet not trivial (for the record, one of the example is taken from "The C programming language" to illustrate the versatility of Scheme - although I tend to prefer the C version :-)).

A word of caution, though : this edition covers R6RS which is not widely implemented yet (and perhaps will never be). So be prepared to adapt some of the sample to suit your implementation.

I bought the book to learn how syntax extension works because reading the doc that comes with my Scheme implementation left me with only a vague notion of this part of the language. I had the impression that this was a quite difficult topic. To my satisfaction, this impression vanished after having read the dedicated chapter of this book.

So all in all, an excellent read !

TSPL is definitely a book I'll keep even after I'm done with the class I bought it for. It's a great reference for everything Scheme, from beginner's concepts to advanced ideas. Especially useful are Chapter 6, which covers all operations for built-in objects, and the list of forms in the back, which covers seemingly _every_ predicate, method, etc.

This book is also worth having in paper format. The online copy is nice, but it doesn't have the same easy referability of the paper version.