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Realm of Racket
Learn to Program, One Game at a Time!
by Matthias Felleisen, David Van Horn, Conrad Barski, M.D., and Eight Students of Northeastern University

June 2013, 320 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-59327-491-7

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Contents | Reviews | Updates

Racket is the noble descendant of Lisp, a programming language renowned for its elegance and power. But while Racket retains the functional goodness of Lisp that makes programming purists drool, it was designed with beginning programmers in mind. Realm of Racket promises to make this language even more fun and accessible with its collection of comics and games.

You’ll follow Chad, a hapless college freshman, whose cartoon adventures introduce new programming skills in each chapter. As you begin to tackle more complex concepts, like recursion, mutable structs, lazy evaluation, and distributed programming, the games get more sophisticated—and more fun! By the end of the book you’ll have programmed and played complete games like Robot Snake, Orc Battle, Dice of Doom, and Hungry Henry.

Along the way, you’ll learn to:

  • Master the quirks of Racket’s syntax and semantics
  • Write concise and elegant functional programs
  • Create a graphical user interface using the 2htdp/image library
  • Create a server to handle true multiplayer games
  • Put your Racket skills to the test by taking on challenging end-of-chapter exercises

Realm of Racket is a lighthearted guide that will teach you some serious programming. Programming just got more fun.

About the Author

Professor Matthias Felleisen is a well-known author of numerous books on Lisp, Scheme, and programming, including the classic Little LISPer (also known as The Little Schemer). Felleisen is also one of the co-founders of the Racket language and the TeachScheme! project, which seeks to bring a gentle notion of algebraic programming to mathematics and science education in high schools. Felleisen is the 2012 recipient of the ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) Lifetime Achievement Award as well as its Most Influential Paper Award. He is currently a Trustee Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Conrad Barski has an M.D. from the University of Miami, and nearly 20 years of programming experience. The author of Land of Lisp, Barski is also an avid cartoonist, having created the popular alien Lisp mascot and many graphical tutorials.

David Van Horn is a research professor who has programmed in Racket and Scheme for over a decade.

Eight students of Northeastern University contributed to Realm of Racket: Forrest Bice, Rose DeMaio, Spencer Florence, Feng-Yun Mimi Lin, Scott Lindeman, Nicole Nussbaum, Eric Peterson, and Ryan Plessner.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Open Paren

Chapter 1: Getting Started
Chapter 2: A First Racket Program
Chapter 3: Basics of Racket
Chapter 4: Conditions and Decisions
Chapter 4 and a Half: (define define ‘define)
Chapter 5: Big-Bang
Chapter 6: Recursion is Easy
Chapter 7: Land of Lambda
Chapter 8: Mutant Structs
Chapter 9: The Values of Loops
Chapter 10: Dice of Doom
Chapter 11: Power to the Lazy
Chapter 12: Artificial Intelligence
Chapter 13: The World is Not Enough
Chapter 14: Hungry Henry (PDF)

Good Bye: Close Paren

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