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Comment by seanm | Hacker News Reader

I found Little Schemer to be too elementary. I feel comfortable with lexical scoping and recursion, I was actually looking for more meat (let vs. let* vs. letrec). I'd recommend "Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days".

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_The Scheme Programming Language_ by Kent Dybvig is also very good. _Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs_ is my preferred "how to think in Scheme" book. I would recommend against _How to Design Programs_, which is entirely too pandering and focused on imperative programming for my tastes.

http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/

It seems there's a fourth edition:

http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/

Also, Wikipedia says that "Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days" is outdated in some parts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_Yourself_Scheme_in_Fixnum...

TSPL4 covers RSR6 which didn't go over very well with the community. TSPL3 is probably the better bet there.

For what it's worth, the second edition of How To Design Programs drops the imperative programming[1] and is available online[2].

I can't comment about the pandering though.

[1] "This edition of the book drops the design of imperative programs. The old chapters remain available on-line"

[2] http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/Draft/index.html

Is that just the first few chapters of the 2nd ed?

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/Draft/i1-2.html

Many chapters after that one are just blank.

Yeah, I'm not sure. That's the "unstable" version, and it looks like some of the chapter's are missing (everything after part 6).

Did you take a look at The Seasoned Schemer, the sequel to the Little Schemer? It might have been better suited to you.

'The Little Schemer' is not intended to be a tutorial on Scheme. To quote the preface, "The goal of this book is to teach the reader to think recursively". Similarly, the other books in the series have well-defined goals.

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