Comment by greyb
12 hours ago
Racket is used across CS programs that have adopted the How to Design Programs book [1] (some schools do not use the original book, just the textbook for source material).
12 hours ago
Racket is used across CS programs that have adopted the How to Design Programs book [1] (some schools do not use the original book, just the textbook for source material).
I was just remembering https://htdp.org fondly yesterday. Working through that book was one of the most wonderful and transformative experiences I've had in programming. I owe so much of my problem solving skills today to that book.
How experienced were you at that time?
HtDP is an introductory textbook. It shouldn’t have new material for someone who has 2 years worth of experience.
That said, while I didn’t learn content from it, the exposition of their process was excellent. It really influenced my “personal software process” a lot. Also, it gave me a lot of tools for informal postmortems that I reach for when mentoring junior colleagues.
The book’s taxonomy of the different kinds of recursion helped me see what others found difficult about it.
Background: I liked SICP but HtDP made it easier to see the content as one unified subject instead of a bunch of tricky/interesting individual exercises.