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

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.

Professor Felleisen is one of the original authors of the Racket language and a co-author of The Little Schemer and How to Design Programs. In 1995, Felleisen launched the TeachScheme! Project, reaching out to high schools with a radically novel computing curriculum. 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, as well as nearly 20 years of programming experience. Currently, he is developing cardiology software for Wolters Kluwer Health. He is also an avid cartoonist, having created the popular alien Lisp mascot, as well as many graphical web tutorials, including the "Casting SPELs" series. He is active in the D.C. developer community and an organizer of FringeDC, a group interested in fringe programming languages, where he gets to indulge in his love for "Lispy" programming languages with other DC language geeks.

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.