TITLE: Acceleration
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: January 14, 2018  9:24 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
This was posted on the Racket mailing list recently:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 "The Little Schemer" starts slow for people who have
 programmed before, but seeing that I am only half-way
 through and already gained some interesting knowledge
 from it, one should not underestimate the acceleration
 in this book.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 <A HREF="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/little-schemer">
    The Little Schemer</A>
 is the only textbook I assign in my Programming Languages course.
 These students usually have only a little experience: often three
 semesters, two in Python and one in Java; sometimes just the two
 in Python.  A few of the students who work in the way the authors
 intend have an A-ha! experience while reading it.  Or maybe they
 are just lucky...  Other students have only a WTF? experience.

 Still, I assign the book, with hope.  It's relatively inexpensive
 and so worth a chance that a few students can use it to grok
 recursion, along with a way of thinking about writing functions
 that they haven't seen in courses or textbooks before.  The book
 accelerates from the most basic ideas of programming to
 "interesting" knowledge in a relatively short number of pages.
 Students who buy in to the premise, hang on for the ride, and
 practice the ideas in their own code soon find that they, too,
 have accelerated as programmers.
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