Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.

What this Book Is Not

This book isn't a language definition for Scheme, or a manual for using any particular Scheme implementation. There is a free language definition document for Scheme, easily available via the internet, called the Revised Scheme Report. (There's also an IEEE standard.) I recommend getting the Scheme report and printing it out, or browsing the html version with a web browser. (http://www.cs.indiana.edu/scheme-repository/doc.standards.html It's not very big, because Scheme is a pretty small language. I also recommend having a look at the documentation for the particular implementation of Scheme you're using.

On the other hand, this book may serve as a passable approximation of a language manual most of the time. (It may work better for this purpose once it's fleshed out more and I've devised more online indexing.) It describes all of the important features of standard Scheme, clearly enough that you can use them for most purposes. This is possible because Scheme is very clean and "orthogonal"---most of its features don't interact in surprising ways, so if you understand Scheme, and do the "Scheme-ish" thing, Scheme will generally do what you expect.

For more information on Scheme, particular Scheme implementations, and so on, see the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) List on the usenet newsgroup comp.lang.scheme. It's available from the Scheme Repository via anonymous internet ftp from ftp.cs.indiana.edu in the directory pub/scheme-repository. Or if you're a World Wide Web user, visit the Scheme repository at http://www.cs.indiana.edu/scheme-repository. The Scheme repository contains several free implementations of Scheme, as well as a variety of useful programs, libraries, and papers.


Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.