Scheme tutorial

["Ian Bicking" <bickiia@earlham.edu>]

I've been thinking about trying my hand at writing a Scheme/Guile 
tutorial.  The usual references to the Little Schemer or the Wizard 
book aren't a good solution, IMHO, because they will put off people 
with casual interest in Guile.

The tutorial I'm thinking about would assume that the reader has 
programmed before, but not in Scheme.

So, a few questions: is anyone working on this?  Are there any 
such Schemey tutorials out there that I haven't seen?  Ones that 
don't start with the much-maligned factorial example?  I haven't 
read through the various Script-Fu tutorials as much as I should, 
but they seem to have the right perspective.

Recommendations for language tutorials that are very well written 
(for any language)?  I have some ideas about what I think would 
make a good tutorial, but more inspiration is always good.

Do people have Guile scripts they'd like to share?  I'd like to get a 
better feel for what end-user scripts might look like, since they'd 
probably look a lot different than code that people actually make 
public.  Examples are everything, and I only have so much 
imagination to come up with them :-)

Opinions on how much I should emphasize scripting an application 
vs. writing a more generic piece of Scheme code?  Is there any 
application that might be considered a reference work for scripting? 
I.e., would there be a Guile-scriptable application that could be 
considered a prerequisite for working through the tutorial, or is that 
too much to ask from the reader?  Installing any particular 
application can be a pain, and I'd like to make the tutorial as low-
commitment as possible.  OTOH, I'd like to have a tutorial where 
people can do some neat things early on, and scripting an 
application is a good way to do this.



--
Ian Bicking <bickiia@earlham.edu>