Customer Reviews

Simply Scheme - 2nd Edition: Introducing Computer Science

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

 

 

"Simply Scheme" is certainly an excellent introductory book on programming in general. I bought it for learning Scheme, though, and was disappointed. Most of this book deals with Scheme extensions written by the authors - you have to load a library file to run them. Towards the end of the book, genuine Scheme features are introduced and their relations with the author's extensions are explained - but this was not enough to make me feel familiar with the Scheme language. The book is nicely written, and 100% recommended for beginning programmers, but not for people with programming experience who want to learn a new language.

A great book to start you off with Scheme, and functional programming. The approach is slightly different from most other Scheme introductory texts, and that makes this book an ideal sequel for all those students that were exposed to Logo as their first programming language. (By this I don't mean those that used turtle to draw nice shapes on the screen, but rather those that have read author's Logo books.) Brian Harvey starts off by introducing Logo procedures into Scheme (word, sentence, first, butfirst...), but don't let this mislead you into thinking that the book is trivial. Book slowly builds up to a spreadsheet and database projects. Full of interesting examples, and very witty. Five chapters on recursion are a gem.

I have been programming for many years in languages such as Assembler,C, C++ and Python. I found I had not many difficulties with getting the concepts of Assembler and C, but concerning C++ and Python there were many things in these languges which I was not able to use effectively, since I did not understand the concepts. That is where Simply Scheme is such a great book. It explains quickly and easily ideas such as recursion, vectors, trees and general symbolic programming. It also helps with terminology, giving names to things I had been doing for years, but had not defined.

I would suggest this book as a great step to those who can doing many things in lower level languages, but want to extend their effeciency. I do not think I would ever use the Scheme language as such, but I will certainly use what I have learned in this book for my programming.

I read this book in preparation for a computer science cource (taught by one of it's authors). I chose the book because the course was taught in Scheme, and I had not encountered the language before. I must say that this is an excellent book. While it may use some non-standard extensions to the language, in general, it does a good job of teaching Scheme. I feel that after I read the book, I was thorougly prepared to read SICP, the main text in my comp sci course. The non-technical and sometimes humorous style made Simply Scheme an easy reading, and allowed me to concentrate on the concepts rather than the jargon.

This is a very basic, but very important book for an introductory course in computer science based on Scheme. If you are trying to learn the basics of the Scheme language, this book is for you.

One of my favorite programs in the book is the locate procedure
dealing with trees. It has an elegant recursive procedure
to find the path of a particular location in a world tree.There are other elegant recursive procedures throughout the book. Recursion was a weakness
for me when I first started to program, but studying Brian Harvey's
examples I feel more confident in dealing with recursion.
I could only dream of being as masterful as Brian Harvey
is at recursion.I took a class at Berkeley with Brian Harvey
Teaching the SICP book not for this one(He's great).You
can also experience him on the Berkeley Webcast through the internet.
Another program that I really liked was the parse program on page
312. I felt it was well organized and very creative.Great book.

The extra star is for the excessive effort these guys had to put in for what they did. It was not very effective. The biggest problem of this book is that it's full of confusing explanations the designers hoped would be "heuristic." This problem permeates the work from start to finish. The use of the special commands by the authors, not part of standard scheme, makes very little sense in most classroom settings that teach Scheme in the hopes of teaching functional programming. The whole idea of functional programming is that you have a bare group of essential concepts AND commands, and work your way from there. I had the great misfortune of taking a class where we weren't allowed to use the specially designed scheme commands for this book, but still had to buy it. If you are in that predicament, the book is completely worthless. Furthermore, while I admire the author's desire to prepare people for SICP, their treatment of this task borders on arrogance. At one point they actually suggest that "SICP was designed for MIT students" and that the rest of us aren't worthy of it yet. Quite frankly for anybody willing to take the time, SICP is not as terrifying as these guys make it out to be. This is a weak book.

Hey kids, this book is kinda good. It teaches Scheme in a clear and understandable way, without falling back to silly "Scheme for dummies" language. I can recommend it.

Scheme itself is a terse declarative programming language with few (more likely zero) industrial uses. However the important and fundamental concepts in computer science are well demonstrated by the authors here. The book does serve fairly well as preparation for SICP but if that is the books purpose then the authors may as use raw mathematical predicates which is alot easier to read than Scheme code. The library code provided by the authors is vital for doing the exercises and coding

without these is not considered making the book a weak reference manual. The book is also too long for a single semester course which means you may as well undertake Knuth's volumes if you are in a long course.