Subject: Re: Never programmed before - want to learn
From: rpw3@rpw3.org (Rob Warnock)
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 05:15:41 -0600
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <oPmdnU2IDZ7AE_zYnZ2dnUVZ_o-dnZ2d@speakeasy.net>
Jake Myers <jake_m_myers@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
+---------------
| From what I've been reading online, Lisp sounds like a good
| language for someone who's never written a line of code before.
+---------------

Yes, indeed! And you'll have fewer preconceptions about Lisp
if you *don't* already know some other programming language
[though you will have to learn programming itself from scratch]...

+---------------
| I've been having a good look at the SICP book (I know it uses
| Scheme, but I understand the two languages are related), and it
| seems to teach a lot of concepts rather than language syntax.
+---------------

Others have mentioned various useful books & on-line tutorials;
here's another good one:

    http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dorai/t-y-scheme/t-y-scheme.html
    "Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days", by Dorai Sitaram

[Note: While it is true that fixnums are smaller than bignums,
"Fixnum Days" might easily be several orders of magnitude longer
than your life expectancy. That is, this *isn't* any kind of
"quick" or "for dummies" text.]


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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