How to Design Programs
This introduction to programming places computer science in the core of a liberal arts education. Unlike other introductory books, it focuses on the program design process. This approach fosters a variety of skills -- critical reading, analytical thinking, creative synthesis, and attention to detail -- that are important for everyone, not just future computer programmers. The book exposes readers to two fundamentally new ideas. First, it presents program design guidelines that show the reader how to analyze a problem statement; how to formulate concise goals; how to make up examples; how to develop an outline of the solution, based on the analysis; how to finish the program; and how to test. Each step produces a well-defined intermediate product. Second, the book comes with a novel programming environment, the first one explicitly designed for beginners. The environment grows with the readers as they master the material in the book until it supports a full-fledged language for the whole spectrum of programming tasks. - Publisher.
Stats for nerds
277recommend
776mentions
440people
2007–2026years
60% recommend37% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I would read (and work though the exercises in) "how to design programs", then follow it up with "the pragmatic programmer". that should catch you up with a lot of best practices.
- > I would now place "learning to code" in the same category as "making a living as a poet." As in, it's truly enjoyable art and some people appreciate it, but you'd better plan for a day job.
Learning to code is not merely learning a syntax and some tooling. It’s best described in the SICP and HTDP books, as a mindset of formalizing a process enough that a dumb machine could do it. Then by building abstractions towers, we have better symbols and semantics to notate the formal aspect.
It seems that a lot of management no longer wants to provide workflows tooling to their users. Instead they want to create a wish box where those workflows would materialize somehow.
- How to Design Programs with Racket was life changing.
That helped me to think about recursion, functional programming, and type driven development. After going through HTDP I was able to breeze through complex problems that were unsolvable before.
- SICP is not intended as a how-to-program manual, it attempts to lay the foundation for a big chunk of computer science. “How To Design Programs” might be a better choice for someone learning Scheme. (But SICP will turn some of the people on to CS as a discipline.)
- Do https://htdp.org and follow all the exercises carefully (yes, it will feel like baby work at first) - you will retrain your brain for functional stuff. :-)
- How to Design Programs: https://htdp.org/2026-2-25//Book/index.html
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