Realm of Racket: Learn to Program, One Game at a Time! Author: Matthias Felleisen | Language: English | ISBN:
1593274912 | Format: EPUB
Realm of Racket: Learn to Program, One Game at a Time! Description
Racket is a descendant of Lisp, a programming language renowned for its elegance, power, and challenging learning curve. But while Racket retains the functional goodness of Lisp, it was designed with beginning programmers in mind. Realm of Racket is your introduction to the Racket language.
In Realm of Racket, you'll learn to program by creating increasingly complex games. Your journey begins with the Guess My Number game and coverage of some basic Racket etiquette. Next you'll dig into syntax and semantics, lists, structures, and conditionals, and learn to work with recursion and the GUI as you build the Robot Snake game. After that it's on to lambda and mutant structs (and an Orc Battle), and fancy loops and the Dice of Doom. Finally, you'll explore laziness, AI, distributed games, and the Hungry Henry game.
As you progress through the games, chapter checkpoints and challenges help reinforce what you've learned. Offbeat comics keep things fun along the way.
As you travel through the Racket realm, you'll:
- Master the quirks of Racket's syntax and semantics
- Learn to write concise and elegant functional programs
- Create a graphical user interface using the 2htdp/image library
- Create a server to handle true multiplayer games
Realm of Racket is a lighthearted guide to some serious programming. Read it to see why Racketeers have so much fun!
- Paperback: 312 pages
- Publisher: No Starch Press; 1 edition (June 25, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1593274912
- ISBN-13: 978-1593274917
- Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.9 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
This is an excellent (and fun) tutorial on a modern multi-paradigm programming language based upon LISP. In reviewing a book on a unusual programming language, I should begin by discussing the language and its applications. Racket is a powerful and modern open-sourced language based on the 50 year old lambda calculus paradigm of LISP. It is a direct descendant of Scheme and especially useful in Computer Science instruction and in defining domain specific languages. Like other LISP's it is a functional language with object-oriented extensions. It is also widely used because of its flexibility in defining dialects as language for teaching programming language theory. It also has all of the important features of most modern programming languages for performing serious work in a number of domains--being open source, compiled to a virtual machine, hosted in a number of the most popular environments (Windows, OS X, Linux), offering a powerful and yet instructional IDE--Dr. Racket, coming with batteries including libraries for web service, document development, process control, operating system interfaces, graphics and language development (lex and yacc style parsing and regular expressions). The byte code compiler and virtual machine are highly efficient, and in most cases assisted by a JIT compiler. On a moderately equipped I3 desktop machine I was able to execute an integer recursive factorial of 10000 in about 30 seconds. Unlike some modern languages it has limited facilities for embedded and physical computing but I have seen a demonstration of racket being compiled for the popular Raspberry Pi and used in the control of sequenced LED displays.
When I was younger (read: Decades ago), I became aware of this pretty cool programming language called Lisp. Lisp was cool because it read easily, it was generally pretty easy to program in and it was highly modifiable in such a way that even before the days of Object Oriented Programming was the `newt big thing', Lisp was already enabling that type of thinking.
The important thing to grasp about Lisp is that it's not just one product. In fact, it's not really a product at all, but it's a concept, and a family of programming languages that all happen to strive for the same goal: Allow for the easy expression of very, very complex ideas. Lisp has been used in such diverse worlds such as space exploration, physics, graphical concepts, game development and financial calculations.
But, what the heck is Racket? That's what the book is... Realm of Racket. Racket is a programming language in the family of languages that comprise the `body' of Lisp. There are multiple derivatives of Lisp, based on what you want Lisp to do. Racket just so happens to be one of those derivatives that lends itself nicely to teaching new and recently new `programming interested' people the concepts of programming is a less complex way.
Imagine tossing a high-school freshman into Advanced C++, when really this freshman wants is to make the football team and date the cheerleader. Our best guess: Not a good fit for a number of reasons. C is complex language for beginners, C++ is just that much more difficult, and Advanced C++... Well, picture our young high-school football player wannabe's head exploding.
Racket, (or Lisp), is tailor made for this young person.
Realm of Racket: Learn to Program, One Game at a Time! Preview
Link
Please Wait...