Scheme Resources

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Drscheme: our interpreter-of-choice

• See the Racket page, especially the download link. The tool formerly known as DrScheme is now DrRacket, a pedagogic IDE, brought to you by the team formerly know as PLT Scheme. Note that you should select the language HTDP/Advanced Student.

Scheme Books

• How to Design Programs (2e) is written by the folks who brought you DrScheme (now Racket). The tool has some special tricks built in for this book. Note that this is really a book about programming/designing programs that just happens to teach you scheme along the way.

• Lots of folks like The Little Schemer but it is print-only.

• Dybvig's book is excellent.

  • Chapter 1 on how to get started/think in scheme
  • Chapter 2 on what we covered, pretty much (but we didn't do 2.8)
  • Later chapters excellent on advanced topics such as continuations, but it does also introduce some things we won't do in this class.

  • Comments:

    • This is my favorite of the two[Dybvig & SICP] for most scheme stuff. -Katie

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is a masterpiece, definitely worth owning for the serious computer scientist, overkill for our use (but I'd love for everyone to read it anyway). Fully available on the web! (AKA the Wizard book) Note that this is really a book about programming/designing programs that just happens to teach you scheme along the way.

  • Sections 1.1 and 1.3 on scheme programming
  • Section 2.1 on cons and 2.3 on lists
  • Section 1.2 on iteration and tail recursion
  • Generally focus on the presentation sections and not the extended examples, though they're beautiful too.
  • More an introductory textbook that happens to use scheme

  • Comments:

• R5RS, the scheme standard. (It stands for Revised⁵ Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme.) Includes complete documentation of the language.

• The Little Schemer is in the Olin Library, as are the above books.

Scheme Tutorials

• Scheme Tutorial at cs.hut This is a decent Scheme tutorial by Catharina Candolin.

• Coding style guidelines An example of good coding style from our friends at MIT.

• Scheme Tutorial at UPenn A helpful sheep of scheme syntax and other basic things. Good to use as a cheat sheet or reference.

• Teach Yourself Scheme in fixnum Days A scheme tutorial for people already familiar with programming concepts.

Scheme Cookbook

• PLT Scheme Cookbook includes intro, fetching a url, ...

• Scheme Cookbook Lots of good recipes....

Cool things people find in/about Scheme

• See also stuff in AskQuestions.

  For example, why define and first class procedures are cool: {{{=> (define + -)

=> (+ 3 2) 1

• }}}

  And the quote trick: {{{=> (car x)

quote

• }}}