Learning Scheme

I was going to mail this info to ahkond, because he recently expressed an interest in the Scheme programming language, but I figured I might as well spread the word here in case there are others who want to learn to program in Scheme (which is also the best way to learn to program).

The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) and How to Design Programs (HTDP) are the two best and most popular introductory programming textbooks. SICP has been the standard first-semester text at MIT, UC Berkeley, etc. for 20+ years; it's somewhat oriented towards someone with a math or physics background, but only in that some of its examples do things like symbolic algebra (polynomial arithmetic). HTDP is much more recent, and has more of an emphasis on the software engineering process, i.e. designing programs rather than just programming. If you're in the Boston/Cambridge area, they are both available at the MIT Press Bookstore in Kendall Square; the complete texts of both are also available on their respective websites, along with exercises and plenty of other auxiliary material. SICP uses the MIT/GNU Scheme implementation, while HTDP uses PLT Scheme, which is what I use for most of my Scheme projects (including my thesis research and The Steak Place). (Both are GPL, of course, and are available on many platforms, including Windows and Mac.)

For more general information about Scheme, check out schemers.org.