Bibliography

This tutorial duplicates material from the Wraith Scheme Help File. I just wanted to make sure you knew it was there.

Scheme References:

These items are all from my bookshelves or download directories. Many have more recent editions.

• Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman and Julie Sussman, 1985. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, MIT. This is an introductory book on computer science for very bright college students. It both teaches and uses an earlier version of Scheme than that described in the R3 report, but the differences are minor. It features many excellent examples of programming in Lisp in general and in Scheme in particular. The early sections are a good introduction to the language, the later ones show well just how powerful it is.

• William Clinger, "The Semantics of Scheme", in Byte 13, no. 2, 221-227 (February 1988). One of several introductory articles on Lisp-class languages in this issue of Byte.

• William Clinger and Jonathan A. Rees (editors), 1991. "The revised 4 report on the algorithmic language Scheme", Lisp Pointers 4(3), ACM. The RN reports (N = 3, 4, 5 ...) define Scheme. They are manuals, not tutorials -- readable once you have some background in any Lisp, and invaluable for specific details, but likely to intimidate a beginner. I strongly recommend that you get copies anyway.

• R. Kent Dybvig, 1987, and subsequent editions. The Scheme Programming Language, Prentice-Hall. The third edition is MIT Press, 2003. An outstanding work describing Scheme. Later editions describe the "R6" variety of Scheme; thus they are perhaps less directly appropriate for learning Wraith Scheme, which is an "R5" Scheme.

• Daniel P. Friedman, William E. Byrd and Oleg Kiselyov, 2005. The Reasoned Schemer, MIT. Scheme integrated with logic programming.

• Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, 1974, 1986, 1987, and subsequent editions. The Little Lisper, MIT. An introductory book on programming in a style appropriate to Lisp, as a programmed text. The more recent editions use a dialect of Scheme as the language in which the examples and discussion are presented.

• Richard Kelsey, William Clinger and Jonathan Rees (editors), 20 February 1998. "Revised5 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme". Available on several Internet sites, such as http://www.schemers.org.

• Jonathan Rees, "The Scheme of Things: The June Meeting", Lisp Pointers V(4) (October-December 1992).

• J. Rees and W. Clinger (editors), "Revised3 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme", ACM SIGPLAN Notices 21, no. 12, 37-79 (December 1986); also an MIT Technical Report.

• George Springer and Daniel P. Friedman, 1989. Scheme and the Art of Programming, McGraw-Hill. A good introduction to programming and to Scheme. More elementary than Ableson, Sussman and Sussman.

Lisp References:

These items are all from my bookshelves. Many have more recent editions.

• Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, "Lisp: A Language for Stratified Design", in Byte (magazine) 13, no. 2, 207-218 (February 1988). One of several introductory articles on Lisp-class languages in this issue of Byte.

• John Allen, 1978. Anatomy of Lisp, McGraw-Hill. An oldie but a goodie. This rather advanced text describes Lisp mechanisms and data structures in considerable detail, with attention both to theory and to practice. Not for the faint of heart.

• Eugene Charniak, Christopher K. Riesbeck and Drew V. McDermott, 1980. Artificial Intelligence Programming, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. An oldie but a goodie. The first section is titled "Advanced Lisp Programming", but after that it gets harder.

• Peter Henderson, 1980. Functional Programming Application and Implementation, Prentice-Hall. An outstanding book on the theory, design and implementation of a class of Lisp-like functional programming languages. Wraith Scheme was originally based on the implementation of an SECD machine described herein. I found the book to be somewhat a "sleeper": I almost stopped reading it because the material in the first few chapters seemed elementary and familiar. I am glad I continued.

• Samuel N. Kamin, 1990. Programming Languages: An Interpreter-Based Approach, Addison-Wesley. How to implement any language you like as long as it's Lisp. Well, not really: This book gives miniature, subset implementations of a representative selection of modern programming languages, all of whose syntaxes have been modified to be Lisp-like (prefix notation with lots of parentheses). The common syntax highlights the differences in semantics. The languages covered include a rather standard simple Lisp as well as simple subset of Scheme.

• Guy L. Steele Jr., 1984. Common Lisp, Digital Press. The definitive guide to that dialect of Lisp which has the greatest claim to being a standard. As a manual, the book is excellent, but it is neither a tutorial nor an introduction. There is a revision (1990), even thicker than the original, that goes into more detail on such special features as the Common Lisp Object-Oriented Programming System.

• David S. Touretzky, "How Lisp Has Changed", in Byte (magazine) 13, no 2, 229-234 (February 1988). One of several introductory articles on Lisp-class languages in this issue of Byte.

• Patrick Henry Winston and Berthold Klaus Paul Horn, 1981, and subsequent editions. Lisp, Addison-Wesley. This rather venerable tome is still a good introduction to Lisp and to what you can do with the language. The first edition uses the "MACLisp" dialect, which is no longer widely used (unless you have in your garage a DEC-20 mainframe or a Symbolics 36XX with down-rev software), but I believe that subsequent editions use Common Lisp. I learned Lisp with this book and a DEC-20. No, not in my garage. (Though I do have a friend who used to have a DEC-20 in her garage.)

Other References:

• Douglas R. Hofstadter, 1979. Goedel, Escher, Bach, Basic Books. A thoughtful and deep book that deals (among other things) with some interesting and profound concepts that are part of computer science, and with other interesting and profound concepts that would be part of computer science if anyone could figure out how to work them in.

• Richard Jones and Rafael Lins, 1996. Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management, Wiley. An oldie but a goodie.

• Tracy Kidder, 1981. The Soul of a New Machine, Little, Brown and Company. Everyone contemplating a career in the computer industry should read this book, the better to recognize job offers from places like this. What you do when you do get such an offer is up to you: I recommend you accept. But remember, misery loves company.

• Pamela McCorduck, 2004. Machines Who Think (25th-anniversary update), A. K. Peters. Well-informed and thoroughly readable history of artificial intelligence.

• David A. Mindell, 2008. Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight, MIT. Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the first digital computer used in an aerospace vehicle that carried a crew flew on board the first spacecraft to visit another world. The whole Apollo flight computer was rather less capable than most of today's five-dollar microcontrollers, but the interface design for it was challenging, and figuring out what it would do and how the crew would interact with it was more so. It was also robust: Could your laptop take a lightning strike and reboot without a blink in a fraction of a second?

• Dr. Seuss, 1955. On Beyond Zebra, Random House. As this classic children's book so clearly demonstrates, a language should allow you to express not only things you can think of, but also things you could not possibly have thought of if you hadn't learned it.

• P. W. Singer, 2009. Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century, Penguin. A thought-provoking read about some of the scarier aspects of artificial intelligence. Military robots are widespread, effective, sometimes already have autonomous authority to shoot, and are in general specifically designed to disobey Asimov's three laws of robotics.

• Guy Steele, 1983. The Hacker's Dictionary, Harper and Row. A funny and quite accurate guide to the jargon of the best of the best of computer scientists. This dialect is to programmers what Chuck Yeager's drawl is to test pilots. I thought the book was a joke until I joined an artificial intelligence lab and found everybody really did talk that way. In this context, incidentally, "hacker" has a much broader and more respectable meaning than its popular use as a synonym for "computer criminal". Virus weenies and digital peeping Toms do not deserve so honorable a label.

• Edward R. Tufte, 1983. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Graphics Press.
• Edward R. Tufte, 1990. Envisioning Information, Graphics Press.
  These books are the main reason I laugh uproariously whenever anyone tells me that some computer or program has decent graphics or a decent user interface. Few books on computer graphics or computer interfaces mention any of Tufte's works; perhaps the authors are too embarrassed.

• David Michael Ungar, 1987. The Design and Evaluation of a High Performance Smalltalk System, MIT. If you read the table of contents and the back cover casually, you might think that this book is about implementing Smalltalk on a chip. Actually, the lion's share of the text deals with good and better garbage collection algorithms.

-- Jay Reynolds Freeman (Jay_Reynolds_Freeman@mac.com)