The Seasoned Schemer

The Little Schemer #3

by Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen, Guy L. Steele Jr. (Afterword)

"drawings by Duane Bibby" foreword and afterword by Guy L. Steele Jr. "I learned more about LISP from this book than I have from any of the other LISP books I've read over the years. . . . While other books will tell you the mechanics of LISP, they can leave you largely uninformed on the style of problem-solving for which LISP is optimized. The Little LISPer teaches you how to think in the LISP language. . . an inexpensive, enjoyable introduction."
-- Gregg Williams, Byte

The notion that "thinking about computing is one of the most exciting things the human mind can do" sets both "The Little Schemer" (formerly known as "The Little LISPer" ) and its new companion volume, "The Seasoned Schemer," apart from other books on LISP. The authors' enthusiasm for their subject is compelling as they present abstract concepts in a humorous and easy-to-grasp fashion. Together, these books will open new doors of thought to anyone who wants to find out what computing is really about.

"The Little Schemer" introduces computing as an extension of arithmetic and algebra -- things that everyone studies in grade school and high school. It introduces programs as recursive functions and briefly discusses the limits of what computers can do. The authors use the programming language Scheme, and interesting foods to illustrate these abstract ideas. "The Seasoned Schemer" informs the reader about additional dimensions of computing: functions as values, change of state, and exceptional cases.

"The Little LISPer" has been a popular introduction to LISP for many years. It had appeared in French and Japanese. "The Little Schemer" and"The Seasoned Schemer" are worthy successors and will prove equally popular as textbooks for Scheme courses as well as companion texts for any complete introductory course in Computer Science.

Download DrScheme - a graphical environment for developing Scheme programs

Genres: Programming, Computer Science, Nonfiction, Computers, Software, Technology, Technical

224 pages, Paperback

First published December 21, 1995

About the author

Daniel P. Friedman is Professor of Computer Science in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University and is the author of many books published by the MIT Press, including The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer (with Matthias Felleisen); The Little Prover (with Carl Eastlund); and The Reasoned Schemer (with William E. Byrd, Oleg Kiselyov, and Jason Hemann).

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Continuing from The Little Schemer, this one has mutable state, closures, memoization, Church encoding, vague allusions to Leibniz's Law, cycle detection with the Tortoise and Hare algorithm, generators implemented with continuations, and other fancy ideas in programming. But it doesn't actually bother to use the conventional terms for the ideas; oh no, that'd be too straightforward, so the words "memoization", "closure", "Church encoding", etc. never appear in the text. Ugh. This is a completely irresponsible way to teach Lisp/Scheme, and it's this kind of nonsense that helps create the "smug lisp weenie" stereotype. If the material seems hard it's because the authors are being coy with their explanations.

Fun for review if you already understand the ideas, but I think The Seasoned Schemer does a disservice to anyone trying to learn something new.

[Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only reason I didn’t give 5 stars is because I had a tough time with this and don’t think I fully grasped all the concepts. To give context, I’m a rising senior undergrad CS student at Wash U in St Louis, and I consider this and the little schemer to be my true introduction to computer science.

I both love and hate the fact that they don’t label or tell you the name of what they’re teaching you. I only learned the book was about “functions as values, change of state, and exceptional cases” from reading the back cover after reading the book. Maybe I’m just an idiot for not knowing that while reading.

The value I got from this is hard to talk about. I definitely felt like I grasped the little schemer better, but enjoyed the same challenge of twisting my brain in knots (maybe even more so) from reading these concepts. It’s cool that they don’t label them because you get closer to the origins of this stuff as just people tinkering and figuring shit out and then giving it a name later.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Continues the Socratic dialog from The Little Schemer, walking you through some of the more difficult themes of Scheme programming. Recommended if you have a real taste for Scheme.

[Dustin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a nice book, I learned a lot of interesting things in it. It didn't have quite as many examples to work through as the little schemer, but there was a lot of good info in it.

[Tom Sturgeon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The problems seem elementary and then the light comes on. This book demonstrates the power of the LISP list idea.

[Fotis Koutoulakis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was excellent - a step lower than its predecessor, but still great in getting you to think about certain topics.

A few chapters were a bit challenging and I intend to revisit them in due time.

[Callan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The seasoned schemer has lots of fun ideas, based heavily around scheme's interesting control structures (letcc), in the usual fun style of the rest of the series. I felt, unfortunately, it concentrated too much on unappealing examples rather than the abstract/conceptual picture of those ideas ending up feeling neither conceptually nor practically satisfying. It jumps from the applicative Y-combinator to church encoded lists but fails to ever give the reader the initial "North pole" continuation of where they are heading and as such feels like a missed opportunity. A nice book for seeing allusions to interesting concepts but not one a person could reasonably be expected to learn those concepts from.

[Anish Rajeev · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was really good at explaining difficult concepts. There was times when it skipped over steps that was confusing, but having you sit there, think, and work for the answers was honestly a lot more rewarding, even if I was frustrated in the process. The biggest complaint I have about this book, though, is the minor fact that they don't attatch names to the design pattern/idea/topic they talk about. I would love to know what exactly I'm reading about so I can further delve deeper outside of the book, but alas I'll have to just do some research online to figure out! Other than that, I cannot recommend this more as a natural progression from The Little Schemer. I'm definitely going to check out The Little Learner and The Reasoned Schemer

[Zenandroid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Will re-read portions of it to finalize my understanding, but it was still a pretty interesting read, albeit some things i did not like about the pacing.

[Peter]

I actually didn't read the last 1.5 chapters. The format is great for learning concepts but I find it tiresome to read and read about complicated structures built in ways I wouldn't have used.

[Mitchell Kember · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you liked The Little Schemer, you should read this too. I'm not sure if I learned a lot from it, but it was definitely fun to read.