[thatcherc]

There's a ton to learn from this book, especially if both Scheme (or functional programming in general) and the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of mechanics are new to you as they were to me when I first came across the text online. I ended up taking the class in person and seriously enjoyed it. It was a big reason I switched my major from CS to physics, which I mean in the best way possible! I think the authors were right in their assessment that Lisps are really well suited to mathematics, and especially the type of math you see in working with Lagrangians: function composition and partial application. Plus there's the cool benefit of being able to write code that looks at other code and writes its derivative as a new program!

The two small warnings I would share with someone starting this book are

1) they introduce some of their own notation to clarify, i.e., what various derivatives mean, but this notation is different than what is found in other texts

2) it ramps up pretty quickly from solving a double pendulum to much higher-level stuff like Lie transforms and perturbation theory - it's a lot to keep in your head all at once. Don't get discouraged if you hit a wall and need to come a couple days or weeks or months later - I definitely did, and it is still fun to try to go back and make it through the harder parts. Highly recommend!