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ITEC380 Racket resources

Running Racket

• If you have your own computer, you can download racket from www.racket-lang.org; you'll get a folder, and you want to launch DrRacket. On-campus, DrRacket is also available on the labs in Davis and Stuart halls.

  The program you want to launch

  Note that the first time you run DrRacket, your OS may warn you that this is an unsigned application downloaded from the internet.

  • OS X: You may need to open System Preferences » Security & Privacy » General, and next to ““DrRacket” was blocked from opening…”, click Open Anyway.
  • Windows 8: Any action needed? let me know. —ibarland
  • Windows 10: Any action needed? let me know. —ibarland

• The first time you start DrRacket, set the language to “Beginning Student”. (This will give the most-informative error messages.) You can set this via: Language » Choose Language… » How to Design Programs » Beginning Student You'll then need to press Run once, after setting the language, for the setting to take effect.

Learning racket

• If curious, you can browse all the built-in functions.
  You can get to this via the racket documentation, but it's hard to find because there is so much documentation; you need to look underneath “How to Design Programs” — more precisely, Racket Documentation » Teaching » "How to Design Program" Languages » Beginning Student

• How to Design Programs (2e) is for the beginner programmer, using the design recipe and racket. It's a good book, and does have sample programs written in the style we use for this class, but it's not the easiest to skim through looking for a particular feature.

  (I worked through this begginner-programming book after finishing my Ph.D. in computer science, and it profoundly transformed my idea of good programming. It is truly worth working through and doing exercises from every section of the book, even for experienced programmers.)

• The one-star “explainers” (only) from beautifulracket.com/#explainers are nice: short, digestible summaries of common topics. (Skip over the first section, “tutorials”; those are tutorials about designing-your-own-language-on-top-of-racket, which is not what you're looking for if you're on this page !-)

  Note that these explainers are for the full-racket language, so some of the items don't work in beginner-student.

  Btw, it's worth noting that that book puts its money where its mouth is: the book itself is a program written in its own book-language created on top of racket. And its design and typesetting is indeed beautiful.

• Racket Basics — a one (long) page with quick examples of all the basic features; intended for people who already know programming. Note that it's aimed at racket, not beginning-student, so it includes things you can't use in beginning-student (e.g. assignment, loops).
• Learn X in Y minutes, with X=racket: As above, but slightly terser.
• Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days is geared for people who already know programming, and is a good concise overview (but it mixes advanced and introductory concepts side-by-side).
• On racket-lang.org, check out the Community and Learning tabs.
• reddit.com/r/racket, where you might be able to ask questions.

• The Edx course How to Program: Systematic Program Design - Part 1. This is an on-line version of the intro course at University of British Columbia, and it is very focused on using the design recipe.

  If you just want to watch the videos from that class, you can instead just see the course's youtube channel.

• §10 of the textbook (Scott).
  See also the differences-in-dialects table below.
• Within DrRacket, when cursor is on a name¹, pressing F1 will show the built-in documentation for that name.
• Use check-expect for exact answers, and check-within for inexact numbers. (check-within is just like check-expect but it takes a third input -- the tolerance, e.g. 0.0001.)
• Rosetta Code site has many programs, each implemented in many languages. Good for seeing "real-world" racket code, and also good for comparing with languages you know.

A few differences in lisp/scheme dialects:

old-school2	racket
car	first
cdr	rest
null, nil, '()	empty, '()
null?	empty?
nil	false, #f, #false
t	true, #t, #true

• For this course, the following functions are not allowed: set!, set-car!, set-cdr!, (or set-first!, set-rest!), and any of the set-struct-field! mutators.

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