Matthias Felleisen

After reading Gödel, Escher and Bach I was determined to learn a LISP, just because I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I won't bother anyone with the details, but arriving at Scheme was a struggle at best.
Being familiar with recursion for the most part on the Prolog and Haskell side of things I was a little hesitant to use this book as my introduction to scheme. And, sure enough, I blew through the first 6 chapters in a day. The second day, I decided that it would be useful to program all the things in parallel to the next chapters, which had me going back to previous chapters to write out these functions as well. This was very useful if only to get familiar with the syntax of Scheme.
Then, the final 3 chapters of the book broke my brain a little. I was not at all familiar with continuation so this was a struggle. Chapter 9 and 10 were very difficult, but also a lot of fun. I'm definately re-reading those in the near-future.
I don't know why, but the kiddy-style of the book and the unusual Q/A build kind of work very well and make it less textbook-y. It at least worked a lot better for me than the daunting "Practical Common LISP" (which is probably a very good programming-book, but which I found extremely boring).… (more)

Reader response, freshly finished: Unsure how I feel about this book.

I really love the didactic style. I found it easy to keep pace. It taught Scheme in a really digestible way .... until the end.

At least, I think it stopped being that digestible by the end. As someone who knows Scheme and understands the concepts (reasonably well), I found slowing down to be difficult, and I also didn't feel the book convinced me why I'd go through the contortions the latter half of the book made me go through.
With my "non-programmer" hat on, I was willing to take the leaps of faith required in the first half of the book while it immediately paid off, by about "Shadows" I stopped seeing why I was learning what I was learning. The authors were being too cute (or maybe holding onto too much for the sequel "The Seasoned Schemer")

Anyone who wants to teach someone programming concepts would do well to learn this book and encourage the use of a REPL. It's a great book for someone who understands programming languages, PL theory, and PL concepts to learn how to teach them to others in an approachable way.

I'd like to see how someone who has no idea or agenda for learning how to program would do with this book. I feel most people would really benefit from the first half and then get frustrated by the second.… (more)