Concrete Abstraction

This text takes a fairly rigorous, hands-on, and abstraction-based approach to teaching the basics of programming and data structures, using Scheme as the language of implementation. The authors feel strongly that since computer scientists not only write programs but also prove theorems and analyze algorithms, this book should provide first-year students the opportunity to do these things as well, and experience at first hand how computer scientists think. In addition, students learn a variety of programming models (called paradigms), including both assembly-language and object-oriented programming (OOP). Although most of the book uses Scheme, Java is introduced at the end as a second language to demonstrate concepts of OOP and concurrent programming.
 
This text takes a fairly rigorous, hands-on, and abstraction-based approach to teaching the basics of programming and data structures, using Scheme as the language of implementation. The authors feel strongly that since computer scientists not only write programs but also prove theorems and analyze algorithms, this book should provide first-year students the opportunity to do these things as well, and experience at first hand how computer scientists think. In addition, students learn a variety of programming models (called paradigms), including both assembly-language and object-oriented programming (OOP). Although most of the book uses Scheme, Java is introduced at the end as a second language to demonstrate concepts of OOP and concurrent programming.