RACKET PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE CODE
The content is of a uniformly high standard - and code examples are extended and enhanced to produce quite complex bit of functionality. Along the way a range of language features are covered - from different language dialects, to graphics primitives, IO, user interfaces and so on. Given what was said earlier, it should be no surprise that mathematical topics are fairly frequent - Fibonacci sequences, factorials, mathematical functions and their plots, Tower of Hanoi and more. For those of us using more verbose languages the difference is striking. At time it's impressive just how much can be achieved in a few lines of Racket code. The author does a great of highlighting the power of the language - the concision, the flow, the ability to distil a problem. It's worth persevering because the more interesting topics start emerging pretty quickly. In any case the material starts to get more interesting as soon as this core stuff is out of the way. The opening chapters start on the basics - syntax, terminology, lists, s-expressions and the kind of dry material that is hard to spice up and make interesting. And, it should be no surprise, DrRacket is used throughout this book. DrRacket is an integrated development environment that is known for being beginner friendly while have extensive support for real development tasks such as refactoring, package management and so on. To start at the beginning, Racket is a Lisp-like programming language with a large and active user community and ecosystem. If that's your idea of fun, and I have to admit some tendencies in that direction myself, then this is the sort of book that might appeal to you.
And beware that the word fun in the title is a specific kind of fun, the kind that appeals to people who like recreational mathematics or exploring abstract ideas with code.
RACKET PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE MANUAL
This is a book for hobbyists - it's not a manual to teach you to program or help you get a job writing code. Paul Graham did a good job expounding on the virtues of Lisp, but even that wasn't enough. But for one reason or another nothing Lisp-like has ever appealed. It's not that I'm only comfortable using one programming paradigm - in my time I've professionally used assembler, C, APL, Visual Basic, Java, Powershell and half a dozen others.
There's a long and distinguished history of course, and numerous variants such as Scheme, Clojure, Hy and more. I have to admit that I've never really taken a shine to programming languages along the Lisp line of descent.
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