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by mheathr 4702 days ago
The Little Schemer and Reasoned Schemer are tremendously fun reads. Little Schemer's writing and presentation style is the standard by which I compare all technical books now.

The books happen to use scheme as their teaching platform but the books are entirely about communicating the concepts that happen to be a part of scheme.

The way the Little Schemer teaches recursion is absolutely brilliant.

If I found myself teaching an intro programming class that would be a part of the curriculum as it is short and communicates the concept in a way that is inescapable while not being dry whatsoever and can be entirely read in a few short settings at most.

By the way, I know from personal experience that at least the majority of the books listed in Jao's scheme bookshelf can be readily worked through in a Common Lisp that supports full TCO, which according to an article from 2011 (http://0branch.com/notes/tco-cl.html) is at least

CMUCL SBCL CCL Allegro LispWorks

I happen to have used SBCL, but I imagine the others would work just as well for these purposes.

Having not worked through them, I cannot confirm whether Programmer avec Scheme or Lisp in Small Pieces can be worked through in CL with slight modifications to the source but I do not see why not.

Google suggests that there does not exist a translation of Programmer avec Scheme anywhere, and no reviews are available on either amazon.fr or amazon.com; that is unfortunate.