Vasishtha Spier wrote at 05/21/2012 02:12 PM:
But most of all how to approach learning it if you have a project starting in the next few months. A reading list, and most of all prioritizing the different Racket and functional programming topics. What are the most important topics to learn before you have to start writing your project and what can be absorbed later etc.

This is pretty much the exact target audience of the book that I'm working on very slowly.

For now, I'd suggest starting with:

1. See "http://docs.racket-lang.org/getting-started/index.html";.

2. Do little one-hour  ``pilot projects'' and experiments.

3. Ask questions on this email list.

A few months is a luxurious lead time to prep for a one-person project that will be on a schedule. Or, if you'll have a project team, a few months gives you some time to start to become a guru on the technology. However, if you have a team project, and you have some tricky problems to solve, or you want to get a team up to speed more quickly and reduce the number of wrong turns, I think one good way is to have a consultant help. (Full disclosure: I make a living being such a consultant.) You could also rapidly own expertise by hiring a new employee: a seasoned expert, or a promising new grad who's been using Racket.

Alternate strategy: if you want to be coding on your project in Racket by lunchtime, just pretend it's Pascal with a Lisp syntax, and start typing. You probably won't get the big wins that way, but I've seen it done successfully wrt business goals.

Neil V.

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