- Hardcover: 616 pages
- Publisher: MIT Press; illustrated edition edition (1 Mar 1994)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0262082268
- ISBN-13: 978-0262082266
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 20.8 x 4.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
5,381,960 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #25 in Books > Computers & Internet > Computer Science > Programming > Languages > Scheme
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Review
Praise for the first edition"... a genuinely terrific introduction to programming and computerscience." Login"The authors have written a very user-friendly book. The sentences andthe programs are short; the explanations are step-by-step." Choice
--This text refers to an alternate
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Product Description
An introductory level text for students who are not majoring in computer science, as well as for computer science majors with no prior programming experience. This text teaches computer science from a functional and symbolic point of view. It provides a solid platform from which students can go on to study the seminal work "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". Beginners will find the authors' approach sophisticated yet conversational and unintimidating. Using Scheme, a modern dialect of Lisp, they teach fundamental ideas and concepts of computer science composition of functions, function as object, recursion, abstraction (data abstraction and procedural abstraction), and sequential (non-functional) techniques - in a way that avoids confusing technical pitfalls. Interesting non-mathematical programming examples use words and sentences as data; practical examples are represented by miniature spreadsheet and database programs. "Simply Scheme" devotes five chapters to recursion, presenting distinct ways for readers to think about this watershed idea. There is also a chapter on file input/output, and students are able to work on substantial, realistic programming projects in the first semester. Compared to Pascal- or C-based texts, "Simply Scheme" has many advantages in its use of the Scheme programming language. Scheme is interactive and allows for ease of program development and debugging; its functions and automatic storage allocation provide a high level of abstraction so that programmers can concentrate on the desired goal instead of on the computer; its simple, uniform syntax doesn't take up months of class time.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
A great book to start you off with Scheme, and functional programming. The approach is slightly different from most other Scheme introductory texts, and that makes this book an ideal sequel for all those students that were exposed to Logo as their first programming language. (By this I don't mean those that used turtle to draw nice shapes on the screen, but rather those that have read author's Logo books.) Brian Harvey starts off by introducing Logo procedures into Scheme (word, sentence, first, butfirst...), but don't let this mislead you into thinking that the book is trivial. Book slowly builds up to a spreadsheet and database projects. Full of interesting examples, and very witty. Five chapters on recursion are a gem.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
9 reviews
27 of 30 people found the following review helpful
A book about programming - not about Scheme
14 Mar 2000
Format:Hardcover
"Simply Scheme" is certainly an excellent introductory book on programming in general. I bought it for learning Scheme, though, and was disappointed. Most of this book deals with Scheme extensions written by the authors - you have to load a library file to run them. Towards the end of the book, genuine Scheme features are introduced and their relations with the author's extensions are explained - but this was not enough to make me feel familiar with the Scheme language. The book is nicely written, and 100% recommended for beginning programmers, but not for people with programming experience who want to learn a new language.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
A great book to start you off with Scheme.
23 April 1999
Format:Hardcover
A great book to start you off with Scheme, and functional programming. The approach is slightly different from most other Scheme introductory texts, and that makes this book an ideal sequel for all those students that were exposed to Logo as their first programming language. (By this I don't mean those that used turtle to draw nice shapes on the screen, but rather those that have read author's Logo books.) Brian Harvey starts off by introducing Logo procedures into Scheme (word, sentence, first, butfirst...), but don't let this mislead you into thinking that the book is trivial. Book slowly builds up to a spreadsheet and database projects. Full of interesting examples, and very witty. Five chapters on recursion are a gem.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
A good conceptual extender
11 July 2005
Format:Hardcover
I have been programming for many years in languages such as Assembler,C, C++ and Python. I found I had not many difficulties with getting the concepts of Assembler and C, but concerning C++ and Python there were many things in these languges which I was not able to use effectively, since I did not understand the concepts. That is where Simply Scheme is such a great book. It explains quickly and easily ideas such as recursion, vectors, trees and general symbolic programming. It also helps with terminology, giving names to things I had been doing for years, but had not defined.
I would suggest this book as a great step to those who can doing many things in lower level languages, but want to extend their effeciency. I do not think I would ever use the Scheme language as such, but I will certainly use what I have learned in this book for my programming.
I would suggest this book as a great step to those who can doing many things in lower level languages, but want to extend their effeciency. I do not think I would ever use the Scheme language as such, but I will certainly use what I have learned in this book for my programming.
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