Book Review: Sketchy Scheme by Nils M Holm
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Thu Dec 1 22:47:23 EST 2022
I just finished reading Sketchy Scheme [1] and I
wanted to give it a quick shoutout to my 3 (if that)
readers :)
TL;DR: This is a great intro on Scheme, but less
about "functional programming" than I expected. It's
a tad bit outdated I think, but holds up pretty well.
So far it's been the best resource I've found on
actually writing Scheme.
There's a lot of great free resources online for
Scheme [2][3].
One of the things I really appreciate about the
langauge and ecosystem is that the language design
all happens in the open. You can read the language
spec (R5RS is only 50some pages) and community
standards (SRFI's -- Scheme Requests for Implementation).
However, docs are docs and they aren't necessarily
the "101" course for someone new to Lisp dialects.
I picked up this book in hopes that it would teach
me more about functional programming. There's a lot
of hype going around about FP these days and I thought
why not learn a little Scheme in addition to a new
paradigm. While the examples were functional (and
certainly interesting) it was moreso the reverse: I
learned a lot of Scheme and a little FP. That said,
it was definitely still worth the read; it has a
great overview of Scheme from the basics (which are
easy to learn online) up to detailed descriptions
of define-syntax and call/cc, which I've struggled
to find good succinct resources on.
For the call/cc and define-syntax bits alone, it was
worth the $15 :) Toss in a detailed overview of the
Y combinator that 100% went over my head and I'll
need to walk through with a pen and paper later
and you've got yourself a great book!
[1]:
http://t3x.org/sketchy/index.html
[2]:
http://scheme.org
[3]:
http://schemers.org
