Is there any chance for another Racket book besides Realm of Racket and How to Design Programs? I like the concept of RoR, but I'm not super interested in web programming and it seems to have a lot of that. HtDP is supposed to be like SICP, which is great, but doesn't help me a lot with learning the language (at least not as much).
RoR doesn't look particularly web-focused to me (the end of it mentions the web server as something worth reading about). That said, it leaves a lot of Racket's features untouched. HtDP doesn't really aim for SICP's niche -- it is meant to be an introduction to programming and the mode of thought involved, rather than trying to cover the structure and implementation of languages.
I really liked RoR for how it presented items and just walked through items. I am self taught and know a dozen languages well enough to write a lightweight program, but RoR made me understand all of them better. I use R weekly and learning a scheme language like Racket opened up a whole part of R I missed. R is actually based off of S as well as Scheme. So I now program totally differently because of RoR.
R is much more functional then most people give it credit.
From Saint Hadley
> R, at its heart, is a functional programming (FP) language. This means that it provides many tools for the creation and manipulation of functions. In particular, R has what’s known as first class functions. You can do anything with functions that you can do with vectors: you can assign them to variables, store them in lists, pass them as arguments to other functions, create them inside functions, and even return them as the result of a function. http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Functional-programming.html
It isn't a pure functional language which is really only available in Academics and Haskell has nomads to get things out which is arguably not pure.
Learning Racket helped me to use the Scheme parts found in R. It really is a little mind blowing. R was mostly used by people with little computer skills and was used with a imperative mindset but when you use it more functional R really shines.
