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by klibertp 2689 days ago
And on a more general note - let's leave the misunderstanding to the separate thread - I'm glad you liked the books! I'm not saying you can't enjoy them - far from it - but if your goal is to just learn Racket quickly (where I interpreted "experienced dev" as "short on time working adult") then they are not the best resource for that. SICP is not even about Racket at all and RoR includes a lot of introductory material you wouldn't need. Instead of learning by accident, ie. reading weakly related material and hoping that an understanding will somehow form (which seemed to be default mode in education), I prefer using materials which are strictly on topic and are dense enough to be efficiently absorbed, but not so dense that it takes a day to go from one page to another. And to that my answer is: Wiki, tutorial&cheatsheet and the docs.

What is obvious is that YMMV - I'm just saying what I'd do if I wanted to efficiently learn Racket today. That's it.
1 comments
BMarkmann 2689 days ago
Yes, I totally agree it comes down to YMMV. Everyone's learning style is different -- some like dense documentation, some like book-style progressive walkthroughs. I certainly didn't learn CL by reading the HyperSpec, for instance... :-)
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klibertp 2689 days ago
Yeah, that's why I included the "but not too dense" part ;) Personally, I actually did learn Common Lisp mostly from HyperSpec (plus reading code - I used StumpWM for a while and wanted to script it), but at that point it was my 4th Lisp (after PLT Scheme/Racket, Emacs Lisp and Clojure) and I was well prepared for it, I think, because of my focus in PL research (hobbyist). I certainly wouldn't say that HS is the way to go for new CL programmers without special preparation.

But, Racket reference docs are not a language definition like HS, RNRS or the Dylan book. The tutorials especially are quite friendly, but the reference is also full of examples, overviews, summaries and introductions, along with the links to the Guide - which can further help in comprehending the content (but only if needed, otherwise they stay out of the way). They're basically amazingly well done and I think more people should read them, if only to learn something about how to write docs and technical prose in general... :)

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