The Little Schemer (The MIT Press) Paperback – 1 Feb. 1996

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.

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.

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 placed this book #4 in my Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science books list:http://www.catonmat.net/blog/top-100-books-part-two/The Little Schemer teaches you a little bit of LISP in the most fun style ever. The book is a dialogue between you and the authors about hundreds of tiny Scheme programs and it teaches you to think recursively. This book will make you think and will stretch your mind a little. It's one of the most fun programming books ever written. Whenever I'm bored, I pick it up and do a few problems.I've gone through this book at least 5 times. Check out this photo that I just took of all the notes that I've made while reading it and the Seasoned/Reasoned Schemers [...]. That is a lot of hours spent with these books. I enjoyed this book a lot and I copied out all the fun code examples and put them on GitHub [...], and I also wrote a blog post about deriving y-combinator based on one of the chapters in this book [...].

Some of the other reviews seem to miss the point. Despite the title this is NOT a tutorial in Scheme, it simply uses Scheme as a teaching language. What it is really doing is teaching recursion and some of the key principles of functional programming. It starts off gently but the last third in particular is mind bending and took me three runs at it to really grasp the points. But at the end of the book I still couldn't write a useful program in Scheme, that's not the book's purpose. So if you want to learn Scheme try the author's other book "How to Design Programs" (available online or in paper), it's a much more conventional, and less challenging book. This book is good and does what it sets out to do, but that's not to teach Scheme. If you want to understand functional programming read this book (and its sequel).

The style of the book - a series of questions and answers, could only work if the author has a perfect grasp of the subject, a clear plan of how to impart it and a gift for making the complex accessible. It works beautifully. Thoroughly enjoyable.

This is an excellent tutorial - although don't buy it if you require a reference work.As for complaints that it is highly cryptic text: Well, I disagree - everything is clearly and logically presented and terms are introduced (yes - car, cdr, cons and lambda are all defined in the opening chapters). To say they are not seems to be evidence of at least one reviewer not paying attention!Perhaps the best aspect of this book is the way it trains your movement of thought through code in the recursive way needed to fully grok Scheme and other LISP like languages.

Ok

This is one of the great books you want to read if you are interested in the LISP language family.It approaches it using Scheme (which is somewhat one of the clearest programming language syntax out there)

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!

What more can I say?This is THE book to start understanding how recursive functions work. It even ends with a derivation for the Y-Combinator! The infamous Y-Combinator isn't just a startup accelerator. That was simply named after the actual combinator that's discussed in this book near the end. Just knowing that is pretty cool, but the value of this book is really in de-mystifying recursion.Recursion isn't used in a lot of mainstream programming. It seems to have become out of fashion and very few mainstream languages now have tail-call optimization. Nevertheless, the resurgence in interest in functional programming demands one to learn about recursion.Thanks to this book, I'm able to write recursive functions just as easily as writing an iterative for-loop. In fact, recursion has made a lot of my work much simpler because I no longer have to keep track of iterators and the like.Highly recommended!

Entrega muy rápida y los libros venían perfectamente empacados.Estoy muy satisfecho con el servicio rápido y eficiente de amazon de Mèxico.Ahora si todos las librerías online de Mèxico van a tener que subir su nivel de desempeño.