Customer Reviews

The Little Schemer

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

In 1974, Daniel P. Friedman published a remarkable little book called The Little LISPer. It was only 68 pages, but it did a remarkable thing: It could teach you to think recursively. It used some pretend dialect of LISP (which was written in all caps in those days). The dialect didn't fully conform to any real LISP. But that was ok because it wasn't really about LISP, it was about recursive functions. You didn't need a computer in order to work through the exercises. After reading the book, I was changed. Or perhaps transformed. Or altered. In a good way. There are very few books that deeply change the way that you think. This is one of those books.

The format is a programmed text with questions on the left side and answers on the right. The way you use it is to read a question, think about the question, come up with an answer, and then compare your answer to Friedman's answer.

He used the names of foods as the symbols that are manipulated by your functions, and little jokes were scattered around to pull you back when things get so deep that your head is going to pop off. It even has a place reserved for JELLY STAINS!

The book has been through several revisions. The latest, The Little Schemer (Fourth Edition), updated by Matthias Felleisen, now conforms more closely to a real programming language, Scheme, and has new chapters which delve much deeper into recursive function theory and language processors.

Felleisen is not as comfortable with the programmed text format, so instead of questions and answers, he has a deranged dialog going on which reads a little like Sméagol and Gollum discussing fishes.

The Little Schemer is not a complete book on programming. It is weak in practical concerns like documentation, defensive programming, and computational efficiency. The development of a system of arithmetic from three primitives is delightful from a mathematical perspective and shockingly horrible from an engineering perspective.

It also will not teach you very much about Scheme. It touches on only a very small part of the language: a very good part.

Despite its flaws, the book has a very loyal following and that is because it works. It teaches one thing, a thing that is very difficult to teach, a thing that every profession programmer should know, and it does it really well. These are lessons that stick with you. You need to grab a sandwich and study this book.

i enrolled a course which teaches Dr. Scheme, i find this book is easy to understand and contains more fun than the normal text book, i love it!

The Little Schemer is the first of a series of 3 books that are designed to teach the user functional programming. The book is written in a "Socratic" format, meaning that it is entirely written in a question and answer format rather than the typical paragraph format that most other books are written in.

As with most computer science text's designed to teach a topic that is non language related: the biggest decision's the author is required to make is what language should be used? In this case the book chooses to use a dialect of the Scheme programming language.

The book takes the approach of trying to teach the reader how to think in a functional manner rather than teaching the user how to program in the Scheme dialect. It accomplishs this by comming up with a list of 10 Commandments and 5 Rules that all functional programmers must follow inorder to write proper functional programs and then uses its question and answer format to build up examples that illustrate these Commandments and Rules.

Pros:

* Lots of example code,
* Each example is gone through step by step
* Each chapter has a clear focus, the Rules are clearly illustrated and explained.
* Teaches the why of functional programming rather than the how

Con:

* The book may move a little slowly for some taste's

A must have 5 out of 5

I am reading this book now, after wanting to get back into LISP programming after a ten year hiatus. My last memory of LISP was when I learned it in high school with an excellent teacher. I wish we had had this book back then! As it stands, I devoured the book in a few sittings -- its amusing, fast paced, rigorous and low-BS structure make it an excellent read.

I'm of the last generation of students who were able to switch on a computer and get a BASIC prompt. The huge heft of "introductory" programming books today leaves me cold and uninspired -- I would hate to have seen these when I was first exploring the excitement of programming.

The Little Schemer, by some of the old gurus of the (I believe) MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab (if not that particular lab, then at least those early, heady days in the '70s when AI wasn't a joke), reminded me of what it used to be like -- slowly building up a repertoire of commands and associated concepts that made programming seem a lot more like playing a Bach fugue and a lot less like debugging window objects. Things like recursion -- the essential part of this book -- are inherently wonderful.

Were I teaching an advanced class for high school students, this book would be at the top of my list. Were I wanting to introduce a liberal arts student into the joys of mathematics, this book would be at the top. Were I wanting to deprogram a bad-habited CS student, this book. Indeed, with so many Universities wanting to stuff some kind of logical, syntatical reasoning requirements into their required courses, this book should be a best seller.

It is a book that recaptures the joys and frustrations of programming and goes a long way to explaining why so many of the brightest people of the 20th century, at some point or another, sat down and cons'ed up a list.

This is one of my favorite programming books, but I had to revisit it a few times to realize it. See, the thing that took me a little while to figure out is this: The Little Schemer is not about Scheme. It's about how to think when you are approaching computer programming issues. It happens to use Scheme as the language of choice, because Scheme is (arguably) the best language available to learn about programming. This book is very well-organized, with each concept building on what has been established before. It is important that you follow through the question-and-answer style of instruction. Try to answer the questions, and think about the answers. The only reason I don't give this book five stars is because I can see it becoming less useful to you as you learn more about programming. Then again, that's the whole point of an introduction, isn't it?

One should not be fooled by the seemingly "simpleness" of its approach in teaching programming, particulary recursion. The reader MUST do the examples and extend them to get a good feel of recursion. I believe the authors want the reader to actually go through the material with a computer running a Scheme/Lisp programming environment; the reader, doing so, will benefit from this "learning-by-doing" approach.

I think this is a marvelous book.

The preface proclaims "Things You Need to Know to Read This Book" - The reader must be comfortable reading English, recognizing numbers, and counting. This perhaps understates the problem, but Friedman and Felleisen do an excellent job of introducing the reader to recursion and Scheme through the use of a formal methods. Concepts are built element-by-element and the reader learns by participating in the socratic "question and answer" style of learning. The examples train the reader to think recursively and present methods for developing recursive programs. Everything is built from first principles -- for example, a system of arithmetic and an equation interpreter is built only from number?, add1, and sub1.

I highly recommend this entertaining book. The material is straightforward and interesting, yet it hints at much more weighty computer science problems. I think it would an excellent text from which to teach college underclassmen (or perhaps even advanced high-schoolers), especially as a first computer science course or as an adjunct to an algorithms class.

Michael C. Vanier (5 star review) said it so well, I cant possibly add anything.

On the other hand, I can add a few words to Wendell's (1 star) review. He states that he found the style so irritating that he could not finish the book. Too bad that he did not persevere untill chapter 9. Then he would have most probably realized that he really can't finish the book, never mind the style.

This is a wonderful book for people who enjoy having their minds stretched. It starts from the most elementary concepts (this is a number, this is a symbol) and then proceeds to teach you how to program in scheme (a lisp dialect) using a question-and-answer approach, with the questions on the left hand side of the page and the answers on the right. Most of the teaching is by example; the authors show you something several times in several different guises in order to get you to understand the pattern underlying the programming examples. This form of teaching-by-pattern-recognition is especially useful for scheme, because lisp-based languages represent such a different paradigm from more conventional computer languages that it really helps to have the pattern in mind when you want to write a new function. The authors show how the basic elements of lisp (atoms, numbers and lists) can be used to solve an amazing variety of problems, many of which would be much harder (or impossible) in more conventional computer languages. Most of the book is so easy that a complete novice who had never programmed before could understand it, but the authors sneakily keep increasing the complexity until in the last three chapters they cover continuation-passing style, the applicative-order Y combinator (!) and writing a scheme interpreter in scheme (!!). Some of these topics would go over the head of most computer science Ph.D.'s (go ahead, ask one what the Y combinator is -- I dare you!). This is not the book to read if you're looking for a "teach yourself visual basic in 20 minutes" kind of book, but if you like programming and you enjoy having your mind stretched, you could not do better than this book (or its companion book, the Seasoned Schemer).

This book was distributed to us, in a CS class, at Rice University in manuscript form. If you are looking for a for a great introduction to Scheme, you've found it. To summarize my reasons for liking this book:

1. It has an enormous amount of information packed into easily readable portions

2. More complex concepts are tied to the simpler concepts they depend upon

3. Material is organized in order of complexity

4. Each concept is described from many angles

5. When describing syntax, the sub-parts of complex syntax are explained well too, providing a fuller explaination. Thus, one develops a better intuitive sense of the language

6. Last but not least, it is excellently written, the style is entertaining but does not compromise profundity. You won't be falling asleep. It's a rivetting read!