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Scheme!

I had a buddy ask me about learning the Scheme programming language... so I figured I'd write a blog post about it!

First a very short history.
A long time ago (in 1958) there was born a language called Lisp.  Lisp is actually the second oldest high level language but that's a different post.  Lisp split into two main branches Common Lisp and Scheme.
Common Lisp is quite large and has lots of features including a full OO system.  Scheme on the other hand is as stripped down as is practical.  For comparison the Common Lisp spec has ~1100 pages while the Scheme R5RS spec has 50 pages.

That being said Scheme has low level primitives which allow you to build high level primitives.
There are lots of great resources out there for learning Scheme and I'm going to list a few here.

Textbooks:



Free textbooks:

Websites:
As for implementations (of which there are many) I think I must recommend either racket or guile.  Racket is a very full featured Scheme including many libraries and a GUI environment where as guile is a smaller scheme used in the Gnome project.

As always the best way to learn a language is to use it.  Scheme is quite a bit different than your standard imperative languages but once your learn it you will have yet another tool in your programming toolbox.
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