+During the course, we'll be encouraging you to try out various things in Scheme and Caml, which are prominent *functional programming languages*. We'll explain what that means during the course.
+
+* **Scheme** is one of two major dialects of *Lisp*, which is a large family of programming languages. The other dialect is called "CommonLisp." Scheme is the more clean and minimalistic dialect, and is what's mostly used in academic circles.
+
+Scheme itself has umpteen different "implementations", which share most of
+their fundamentals, but have slightly different extensions and interact with
+the operating system differently. One major implementation used to be called
+PLT Scheme, and has just in the past few weeks changed their name to Racket.
+This is what we recommend you use. (If you're already using or comfortable with
+another Scheme implementation, though, there's no compelling reason to switch.)
+
+* **Caml** is one of two major dialects of *ML*, which is another large family of programming languages. The other dialect is called "SML" and has several implementations. But Caml has only one active implementation, OCaml, developed by the INRIA academic group in France.
+
+* Those of your with some programming background may have encountered a third prominent functional programming language, **Haskell**. This is also used a lot in the academic contexts we'll be working through. Its surface syntax differs from OCaml, and there are various important things one can do in each of Haskell and Ocaml that one can't (or can't as easily) do in the other. But these languages also have a lot in common, and if you're familiar with one of them, it's not difficult to move between it and the other.
+
+[[How to get the programming languages running on your computer]]
+
+## Recommended Readings ##
+
+* *An Introduction to Lambda Calculi for Computer Scientists*, by Chris Hankin...
+
+* *The Little Schemer, Fourth Edition*, by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, currently $23 on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262560992/ref=pd_sim_books/103-5471398-9229403#reader_0262560992).