[drcode]

this series of books has an unusual pedagogical style, with a big "bang for the buck" in terms of building up complex systems from basic steps

there is zero fluff, almost zero narration

the books are basically just input output pairs of "now do this, and now that happens"

they are basically a sort of brain data dump for people who can think with computer code

[leoc]

Guy Steele's keynote talk at Dan Friedman's 60th-birthday academic festival, "Dan Friedman--Cool Ideas", gives lots of the background: https://youtu.be/IHP7P_HlcBk?t=2198 . Apparently the format was originally a parody or adaptation of that of an IBM Fortran instruction manual based on Skinnerian programmed-instruction ideas.

[leoc]

You can see the FORTRAN texts on Bitsavers: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/1130/lang/

[rootusrootus]

> people who can think with computer code

In particular, Scheme. If your language of choice is, say, Python, then you'll want to get a primer on Scheme before reading this particular book. Maybe by starting at the beginning of the series.