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Comment by farresito | Hacker News Reader

The Little Schemer is a very fun book! If you are thinking about learning Lisp, go for it. At least, give it a try. It's quite different from most books out there, but it's very good nonetheless. I read it last year while in the train and it's quite entertaining.

EDIT: I forgot to explain why it's such a good book: it teaches you how to think in Lisp. It doesn't focus at all in the syntax.

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I don't understand your comment. Sorry. Could you explain?

Only the true Little Schemer fans will understand my comment.

That's the classic joke from this book. End of first chapter, p. 13.

Go cons a piece of cake onto your mouth!

As someone who has never touched Lisp, why is thinking in Lisp good?

Functional programming/paradigm. It's a pretty nice language to learn it (my intention was to learn Clojure, but I read this book first so that I had an small base).

But today, one can learn functional programming also with other languages than Lisp.

The book isn't really about lisp, it's about thinking in terms of higher order functions and recursion, which apply in any functional language.

The same people have also written The Little MLer (http://www.amazon.com/The-Little-MLer-Matthias-Felleisen/dp/...).

Which is also brilliant, but is more about thinking in terms of types (more advanced type systems, then C/C++/Java etc).

Should make a good warm up for learning the likes of OCaml and Haskell

Almost all the exercises can be done in Haskell with a small amount of syntactic adjustment

The cool thing about learning in Lisp (or Scheme) is that the language doesn't really get in the way. It's less about learning the syntax of a language and more about focusing on the algorithms/concepts.

For instance, it's a great manifestation of lambda calculus.

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