Programming Books

6 Excellent Free Books to Learn Racket

Last Updated on May 22, 2022

Racket is a general-purpose, object-oriented, multi-paradigm, functional, imperative, logic based programming language based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp. It’s designed to be a platform for programming language design and implementation.

Racket is also used to refer to the family of Racket programming languages and the set of tools supporting development on and with Racket. It has a powerful cross-platform GUI library built in.

Racket’s core language includes macros, modules, lexical closures, tail calls, delimited continuations, parameters (fluid variables), software contracts, green and OS threads, and more. The language also comes with primitives, such as eventspaces and custodians, which control resource management and enables the language to act like an operating system for loading and managing other programs.

Racket is often used for scripting, computer science education, and research. It’s an open-source project (Apache/MIT).

Here’s our recommended books to learn Racket.


1. How to Design Programs, Second Edition by Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, Shriram Krishnamurthi

How to Design ProgramsHow to Design Programs introduces the concept of a design recipe, a six-step process for creating programs from a problem statement.

The authors explain the design process starts with a careful analysis of a problem statement with the goal of extracting a rigorous description of the kinds of data that the desired program consumes and produces. The structure of these data descriptions determines the organization of the program.

The book the proceeds to introduce data forms of progressively growing complexity. It starts with data of atomic forms and then progresses to compound forms, including data that can be arbitrarily large. For each kind of data definition, the book explains how to organize the program in principle, thus enabling a programmer who encounters a new form of data to still construct a program systematically.

The book is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license.

Read the book


2. Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation by Shriram Krishnamurthi

Programming Languages: Application and InterpretationThis book unites two approaches to teaching programming languages, one based on a survey of languages and the other on writing definitional interpreters.

It has been used as a textbook at over fifteen institutions worldwide, and is referenced by non-academic users on the Web. The book is updated approximately frequently.

Read the book


3. Picturing Programs: an Introduction to Computer Programming by Stephen Bloch

Picturing Programs: an Introduction to Computer ProgrammingPicturing Programs is a textbook for beginning computer programming.

This book can be used at the high school (and perhaps middle school) level, while providing enough advanced concepts not usually found in a first course to challenge a college student. Those who have already done some programming (e.g. in Java, Python, or C++) will enhance their understanding of the fundamentals, un-learn some bad habits, and change the way they think about programming.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation.

Read the book


Next page: Page 2 – Beautiful Racket and more books

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – How to Design Programs and more books
Page 2 – Beautiful Racket and more books


All books in this series:

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