I can attest to _Little Schemer_ being a wonderful book. There's just something very cool about a book that's both easy for beginners to pick up and that goes through a derivation of the Y Combinator. But maybe I'm just biased because I'm on this site. ;)
I keep trying to work my way through The Little Schemer, my latest attempt was a few days ago, but I immediately become bored to death with the exercises.
This is actually a more general problem than just The Little Schemer. If I already know the material at the beginning of a book (or if it's plain boring) I have a hard time getting into it.
Perhaps I could binary search the chapters until I find the point where new material begins.
The way I read The Little Schemer featured a lot of skimming, punctuated with occasional moments of re-reading. I enjoyed that series, but I think if I had read it line by line I would have gone insane (at least in the first book). The key is to figure out what they're trying to teach in a particular section (for instance, a large chunk of the first book is really just trying to teach you recursion).
I remember when I first read this a while back, and I wanted to read the little schemer too. It's now in 4th ed. (http://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/02... - $22) but I really wish there was an e-version for my Kindle: PDF, anything.
It's awesome that you're in high school and you're already checking out Scheme. I did the same thing (I'm a freshman in college now). (:
On that note (since I'm derailing the topic of conversation anyway), does anyone have experience with teaching Scheme to younger kids? The Little Schemer seems a little too hard for a child, but I think Scheme would make an awesome introduction to programming (or maybe I'm just a horrible language bigot). For the really little ones, I'd probably use Logo.
Many years ago, I TA'ed a class that did exactly that, teaching Scheme to gifted students ages 12 to 15. The text we used was "The Schemer's Guide" by Iain Ferguson, supplemented with a large helping of locally-prepared material about propositional logic, recursion, Turing machines, etc. In that way, Scheme comes across as a natural implementation of these concepts.
It's worth noting that 90+% of the work in this class, including programming projects, was conducted as pen-and-paper exercises, not on a computer.
