What all books ought to be.

The Little Schemer was first published (then called "The Little LISPer") over two decades ago, it uses an dialect of a somewhat obscure programming language that's been around since 1958, and it's the best computer book I've ever read. It's the best textbook I've ever read. In fact, it's the best book I've ever read to learn something. Maybe it's just the best book. Why? Look at the first page of text (courtesy Amazon):





Where's the text? Where's the explanation of what I'm supposed to learn? Where's the material? Well, it there, but it's just questions and answers. You read a question and you try to answer it. You probably know this as the Socratic method of teaching, or it would be called that if there were a teacher in the flesh asking the questions. You would think that such a style of learning would rely upon the teacher carefully monitoring the student's understanding and tailoring the questions accordingly. But I guess not. Or that is, I guess you don't need to customize the questions, you just need to get the questions exactly right. They did.


(Even if this book weren't socratic, I'd be in my top ten of computer books just for jumping into the subject right off the bat instead of starting with fifty pages of the usual filler followed by a "gentle" introduction to the topic at hand. If I had a dollar for every book I own that has: "Chapter One: The History of Java" and "Chapter Two: Why Should I learn Java?" and "Chapter Three: Java and the World Wide Web" I could save myself the time of selling them on Amazon. Though I could make, in many cases, as much as double that.)


The really great thing about this book is that actually the material mostly isn't there, not in print. The most important part of the "read a question, try to answer" cycle is "figure out what the writers wanted you to learn from it". For the best questions, you don't figure out all the intent until several questions later. Or maybe even several chapters later, I don't know yet. I'll keep you posted.

So are there any other "socratic" books? Yes. The authors of The Little Schemer (Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen) later wrote a similarly styled book about Java (and though I haven't read it, I know Java very well, and I'm pretty sure that what the reader learns is far inferior in that book). This book in turn collected an imitator (I mean no disrespect) directed at teaching Ruby. Only a few chapters of the Ruby book have been written, but on the plus side, they are freely available. Shouldn't there be books written in this style in other subjects? There must be, right?

In raving about socratic books, I have left something out. I implied above that the subject matter of the book is a drag on it's greatness, that the book is good in despite that it's a Lisp book. And I would be pretty impressed with such a book no matter what the topic. But in fact I am working my way through the book entirely *because* it's teaching me Lisp (in this case the Scheme dialect of Lisp), or using Lisp to teach me how to program in the Lisp style. And Lisp is good.