Review: The Little Schemer

Having recently finished the Little Schemer I thought it is about time that I put forth a review of the book.

Little Schemer is without a doubt one of the best books I have ever read on the subject of recursion, and what is interesting because they never really go into a formal definition of what recursion is, as most texts on computer science try to. Instead they show the reader time and time again what recursion is, while providing a great series of rules (commandments) on how to get the most out of recursion, particually in a tail-recursive language like Scheme.

The book is structured as a series of questions and answers. Each page has several questions on the left hand side, with answers on the right hand side. The overall interpretation of the book is that you can read this without a computer, using pencil and paper to work through the many questions in the book.

As the reader progresses they will continue to develop and reimplement many useful tools in Scheme that become more and more practical as the text goes on. What is great about this method is the pacing and the steady revealing of topics and good practices presented by the author. Because they gradually accustom the reader to topics like recursion, list operations, and lambda, by the time they show how define is unneccessary in Scheme due to the Y Combinator this rather challenging concept seems somewhat intuitive.

Overall I think this is one of the greatest computer science books I have ever read. Sure it may not formally define things or be the absolute easiest text to read on the Scheme language itself, but this book should not be used as a reference product - it should be used as a tool bye which the reader strengthens their fundamentals in computer science and programmer, whether or not they ever touch Scheme again.