[samdk]

The Little Schemer was what finally got me to internalize how to solve problems recursively. I'd taken a couple of college classes and could do it some already, but it took a lot more thought than solving those same problems in other ways.

About a third of the way through The Little Schemer, things just clicked, and what had been hard became pretty instantly easy.

Some of that was it building on existing knowledge, but I found the structure very helpful. The narrative is really just the glue around a well-designed series of incremental problems.

[eatonphil]

As a separate path, I finally learned to internalize recursion by building a R7RS Scheme (and a good chunk of its standard library) and spending a year doing projects for fun in various Schemes and Standard ML.

I'm not saying every dev needs to do this but if you do want to get better at recursion, reading this book isn't the only path (good news for me because I really didn't like The Little Xer format).

[ripley12]

> The narrative is really just the glue around a well-designed series of incremental problems.

I felt like The Little Schemer should have given those (nicely incremental) problems more real-world context. I worked my way through it and was frequently left wondering "OK, that's clever - but why should I care?"

Clearly a lot of people find the book useful, I might be the odd one out, but I was mostly left scratching my head.