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San Francisco, CA, June 18, 2013—Racket is a powerful, elegant programming language well suited for novice coders, first-year programming students, and those who simply want to write better code in any language. With this in mind, one of Racket's original creators—Northeastern University professor Matthias Felleisen—teamed up with a handful of freshman computer science students to write Realm of Racket (No Starch Press, June 2013, 312 pp., $39.95, ISBN 9781593274917), released this month by No Starch Press. Using the students' insights about learning to program, the book mixes game programming, technical explanations, and comics to make powerful programming concepts accessible to a wide audience.

Inspired by Conrad Barski's essential Lisp programming guide, Land of Lisp, Realm of Racket guides readers through the fundamentals of the language with a fun, lighthearted tone. As readers master the concepts introduced in each chapter, they'll incorporate their newfound skills into a series of increasingly sophisticated Racket-based games—ranging from the simple Guess My Number game to Hungry Henry, a complex multiplayer game. Cartoon adventures keep things fun along the way, and chapter checkpoints make sure the material sticks.

Readers will also 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

According to Barski, "Realm of Racket does a great job of taking a beginner from zero all the way to the most advanced programming topics. I don't know of any other programming textbook that manages to do this better. If you want to learn how to develop software in the best way possible, right from the start, Realm of Racket is the book you want."

Learning a serious programming language doesn't have to be a huge headache. With Realm of Racket, programming just got a lot more fun.

About the Authors

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 (now known as ProgramByDesign and Bootstrap), 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 ACM's 2009 Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator 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 at Northeastern University 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.

Dr. Felleisen, Dr. Barski, Dr. Van Horn, and members of the student author team are available for radio, TV, print, and online interviews. Please contact [email protected].

About No Starch Press
Founded in 1994, No Starch Press publishes the finest in geek entertainment—unique books on technology, with a focus on open source, security, hacking, programming, alternative operating systems, LEGO, science, and math. Our titles have personality, our authors are passionate, and our books tackle topics that people care about. No Starch Press titles have been included in the prestigious Communication Arts Design Annual and STEP Inside 100 competition, and have won the Independent Publisher Book Award (the "IPPY") from Independent Publisher magazine. Visit http://www.nostarch.com for a complete catalog.

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