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Rating: 
Summary: Great foundations
Review: Concrete Abstractions provides a great intoduction to the world of Computer Science. It covers well basic ideas of abstractions, software design, algorithms, sorting, and much more. Even after one gets a handle on the ideas presented, the book serves well as a handy reference. Very sound theory with challenging exercises. I recommend it to anyone studying computer science in a college environment. The only downside is that the book relies on the Scheme programming language; an obscure academic language. This isn't a large setback as the theory covered in the book is easily applied to all languages.
Rating: 
Summary: Scheme - A Good Choice to Teach CS
Review: Scheme has been taught to every student taking computer 'science' at MIT for the past 20 years, and it is increasingly used throughout the world to teach that subject. The mainstream languages C++ and Visual Basic are considered to be poorly designed, and C is too low level to be a good choice in a course intended to provide a comprehensive introduction to computer science (which goes far beyond what the average person calls 'programming').Scheme is a variant of Lisp, which is the second oldest computer language, after Fortran. It is, however, a thoroughly modern language, and has strongly influenced the design of other modern languages like ML and Python. The book starts in Scheme, then adds object oriented techniques and assembly language. It finishes with a transition to Java, which is, of course, similar to C++. This approach will provide a much broader background than a typical text using C++ or C could.
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