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Simply Scheme - 2nd Edition: Introducing Computer Science
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Author: Brian Harvey, Matthew Wright
List Price: $67.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0262082810
Publisher: MIT Press (27 August, 1999)
Edition: Hardcover
Sales Rank: 173,864
Average Customer Rating: 3.71 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 2 out of 5
Weak
The extra star is for the excessive effort these guys had to put in for what they did. It was not very effective. The biggest problem of this book is that it's full of confusing explanations the designers hoped would be "heuristic." This problem permeates the work from start to finish. The use of the special commands by the authors, not part of standard scheme, makes very little sense in most classroom settings that teach Scheme in the hopes of teaching functional programming. The whole idea of functional programming is that you have a bare group of essential concepts AND commands, and work your way from there. I had the great misfortune of taking a class where we weren't allowed to use the specially designed scheme commands for this book, but still had to buy it. If you are in that predicament, the book is completely worthless. Furthermore, while I admire the author's desire to prepare people for SICP, their treatment of this task borders on arrogance. At one point they actually suggest that "SICP was designed for MIT students" and that the rest of us aren't worthy of it yet. Quite frankly for anybody willing to take the time, SICP is not as terrifying as these guys make it out to be. This is a weak book.
Rating: 2 out of 5
An interesting read
Scheme itself is a terse declarative programming language with few (more likely zero) industrial uses. However the important and fundamental concepts in computer science are well demonstrated by the authors here. The book does serve fairly well as preparation for SICP but if that is the books purpose then the authors may as use raw mathematical predicates which is alot easier to read than Scheme code. The library code provided by the authors is vital for doing the exercises and codingwithout these is not considered making the book a weak reference manual. The book is also too long for a single semester course which means you may as well undertake Knuth's volumes if you are in a long course.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Simpy Scheme
I read this book in preparation for a computer science cource (taught by one of it's authors). I chose the book because the course was taught in Scheme, and I had not encountered the language before. I must say that this is an excellent book. While it may use some non-standard extensions to the language, in general, it does a good job of teaching Scheme. I feel that after I read the book, I was thorougly prepared to read SICP, the main text in my comp sci course. The non-technical and sometimes humorous style made Simply Scheme an easy reading, and allowed me to concentrate on the concepts rather than the jargon.
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