Rating:
(10 reviews)
Author: Visit Amazon's Matthias Felleisen Page
ISBN : 1593274912
New from $26.98
Format: PDF, EPUB
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Amazon.com Review
An Excerpt From the Preface: "Why Should I Learn About Racket?"
You’ve certainly heard of JavaScript, Perl, Python, and Ruby. But what about Racket? Just because it’s not the most mainstream programming language doesn’t mean you should discount its capabilities. Racket allows functional programming and other different paradigms that even hard-core programmers have never seen before. Get ready for the excursion. Even after you get through "Realm of Racket," there is a lot to explore.
About the Author
Professor Matthias Felleisen is one of the original authors of the Racket language and a co-author of The Little Schemer and How to Design Programs. In 1995, Felleisen launched the TeachScheme! Project, reaching out to high schools with a radically novel computing curriculum. Felleisen is the 2012 recipient of the ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) Lifetime Achievement Award as well as ACM's 2009 Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. He is currently a Trustee Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.
Conrad Barski has an M.D. from the University of Miami and nearly 20 years of programming experience. The author of Land of Lisp, Barski is also an avid cartoonist, having created the popular alien Lisp mascot and many graphical tutorials.
David Van Horn is a research professor who has programmed in Racket and Scheme for over a decade.
Eight students of Northeastern University contributed to Realm of Racket: Forrest Bice, Rose DeMaio, Spencer Florence, Feng-Yun Mimi Lin, Scott Lindeman, Nicole Nussbaum, Eric Peterson, and Ryan Plessner.
Books with free ebook downloads available Free Realm of Racket: Learn to Program, One Game at a Time!
- Paperback: 312 pages
- Publisher: No Starch Press (June 25, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1593274912
- ISBN-13: 978-1593274917
- Product Dimensions: 0.9 x 7 x 9.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Realm of Racket: Learn to Program, One Game at a Time!
This is an excellent (and fun) tutorial on a modern multi-paradigm programming language based upon LISP. In reviewing a book on a unusual programming language, I should begin by discussing the language and its applications. Racket is a powerful and modern open-sourced language based on the 50 year old lambda calculus paradigm of LISP. It is a direct descendant of Scheme and especially useful in Computer Science instruction and in defining domain specific languages. Like other LISP's it is a functional language with object-oriented extensions. It is also widely used because of its flexibility in defining dialects as language for teaching programming language theory. It also has all of the important features of most modern programming languages for performing serious work in a number of domains--being open source, compiled to a virtual machine, hosted in a number of the most popular environments (Windows, OS X, Linux), offering a powerful and yet instructional IDE--Dr. Racket, coming with batteries including libraries for web service, document development, process control, operating system interfaces, graphics and language development (lex and yacc style parsing and regular expressions). The byte code compiler and virtual machine are highly efficient, and in most cases assisted by a JIT compiler. On a moderately equipped I3 desktop machine I was able to execute an integer recursive factorial of 10000 in about 30 seconds. Unlike some modern languages it has limited facilities for embedded and physical computing but I have seen a demonstration of racket being compiled for the popular Raspberry Pi and used in the control of sequenced LED displays.
The inverted review bell curve on Abelson's seminal book on Lisp and functional programming (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Second Edition) shows either love or hate, and little in between! Those who love it say it is a life changing experience for mathematicians, engineers and physicists as well as programmers, and indeed Abelson does border on the mystical when describing nested recursive functions with "hundreds" of parentheticals preceding quantum-level differential equations, all running on numerics, beneath which are (self defining recursive quantum states) and....
The problem, especially with those who hate it, is that lambda calculus, recursion, and multiple paradigm (imperative, functional, logical, etc.) models mean that each sentence is an adventure in study, not reading. IOW, I stopped highlighting when I realized I was highlighting the whole page!
This awesome new Racket gem makes Abelson an unprecedented one-two punch if you REALLY want to understand some of the hottest new concepts in programming-- at a 30,000 foot level, yet with a TON of fun, down to earth exercises. Lisp has evolved as the second oldest (months after FORTRAN) language that is not only still in use, but still producing new dialects, as this book demonstrates! I mean, a data structure not of hashes and trees but of LISTS??? You'll learn to your amazement how lists can even handle multiprocessor and concurrent computing nightmares with recursion that would defy the most agile trees. Talk about ancient and up to date at the same time!