pattis@cs.washington.edu (Richard Pattis) (03/11/91)
I met three fascinating gentleman at the ACM's SIGCSE conference. They all teach Scheme at the middle- and high-school level. Recently, they have self- published a book called "The Schemer's Guide"; this book is above the level of "The Little Lisper" but below that of Springer and Friedman. Besides gently introducing the concepts of symbolic manipulation, functional programming, and recursion, the book includes discussions of currying, accumulating/mapping/filtering, delayed evaluation, and call/cc. The book looks professionally done, and runs over 300 pages and they charge about $30. The authors are Iain Ferguson, Edward Martin, and Burt Kaufman. One of the authors (Iain) has written a Scheme interpreter (in C, called EdScheme) which is available on IBMs, Ataris, and in September on Macs. Look for a review of EdScheme in the May 1991 issue of the international edition of BYTE. It comes with a professionaly typeset 124 page guide and costs about $50. Both book and software are available on a 60 day money-back offer. These guys are truly committed to Scheme; I admire the lengths to which they have already gone to see their vision of how programming should be taught. I'd like to see their work become known in a wider context: their contacts in the Computer Science world (even K-12) are almost NIL. If you'd like to lend them some support and help them make contact with other instructors teaching Scheme, at any level but especially high-school/college, and make them a little more savy about the wide-world-of-Scheme, please contact Schemers Inc. 4250 Galt Ocean Mile, Suite 7-U Ft. Lauderdale, FL. 33308 (305) 776-7376 - this is one of the guy's home phone Rich Pattis (sorry this was so gushy, but I was really blown-away by these guys; I have no financial interest in their work: they offered my a free copy, but I figured they needed a boost, so I bought one).