Realm of Racket: Learn to Program, One Game at a Time!

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!

An Excerpt From the Preface: “Why Should I Learn About Racket?”

You’ve certainly heard of JavaScript, Perl, Python, and Ruby. But what about Racket? Just because it’s not the most mainstream programming language doesn’t mean you should discount its capabilities. Racket allows functional programming and other different paradigms that even hard-core programmers have never seen before. Get ready for the excursion. Even after you get through “Realm of Racket,” there is a lot to explore.

Table of Contents

Preface: Hello World
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 : 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
Good-Bye: Close Paren
Index