Tutorials

If you are new to programming or if you have the patience to do so, you should work through a textbook:

  • a recommended text available online is Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days
  • the Little Schemer book(s) we recommended for the seminar are good introductions, requiring more commitment
  • How to Design Programs (HtDP), by Matthias Felleisen, et al., is another good choice, which the Racket group recommends
    (the 1st ed is also available, and covers some additional topics like mutation; whenever the book says "Scheme," you can read it as "Racket")

If you're already a programmer and you're in more of a hurry:

Advanced Racket Docs

Advanced Chicken Docs

Other Scheme Links

The Scheme language is standardized; the various implementations of the language usually adhere to what's published in the current standard and add on different handy extensions. The first standard was published in 1975. A revision was published a few years later called "The revised report on Scheme, a dialect of Lisp." Thereafter, revisions of the standard were titled "The Revised Revised Report..." and so on, or "The Revisedn Report..." for short. One widely implemented standard is The Revised5 Report on Scheme, or R5RS, published in 1998. Another standard R6RS (libraries) was ratified in 2007, but had many detractors and wasn't fully accepted in the community. Currently Scheme is being split into a lean minimal base, now ratified as R7RS-small (errata), and a richer language R7RS-large (still being designed) that standardizes many add-ons.