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I actually liked the Little Schemer a lot, specifically the way it's laid out with just questions in one column and answers in another (it helped establish a rhythm that made it nice to go through); but I did find the tone a little "young".

All the examples are about food, and there's cartoons littered throughout. There's a bunch of books that seem to be of that tone (Learn you a Haskell, Land of Lisp, Realm of Racket, Learn You Some Erlang), and I found myself instinctively recoiling from all of them (I haven't read the Erlang book, but it seems very much in that style).

I think it's important to have lots of different styles of books for learning a language, because I think different people respond better to different approaches, but selfishly, I wish every language had an equivalent to "ANSI Common Lisp" (by this site's benefactor emeritus) and Real World Haskell. I am also a big fan of the way Zed chose to lay out his books.



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