This tutorial has been written as course material for the course
Basic Course in Programming T1 held at Helsinki University of
Technology. The aim has been to provide the students with additional material
that would help them learn Scheme as a language.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which is used as
the course book, is an excellent book about programming, but it does not cover
Scheme as a language. The standard 
covers the language, but
expects the reader to be familiar with programming and the basics of Scheme.
This tutorial will try to find its place somewhere in between: it will go
through the language features presented in , provided with
various examples. This tutorial will not, however, be a programming tutorial.
The reader is encouraged not to read this tutorial from cover to cover, but to read the parts that seem important for the time being. The tutorial will not try to teach Scheme in a stepwise fashion, it merely provides the reader with examples and explanations of the different language features. Don't worry if the examples contain language features that you are not familiar with yet, they are described in other parts of the tutorial and are hardly ever important for understanding the essential part of the example.
Some of the language features will be left unmentioned in this tutorial, but
they are discussed in . These are, for example, continuations,
eval, macros, delay and force. Some of the
procedures related to input and output will also be left unmentioned. If you
are interested in continuations, then you might want to read the book
Scheme and the Art of Programming by Friedman and Springer. The book
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson, Sussman
and Sussman contains a section discussing delay and force in
the context of streams. Apart from that, is the best source and the
reader is encouraged to study it side by side with this tutorial.
I thank Heikki Saikkonen, Markku Syrjänen and especially Mikko Tiusanen for teaching me the joy of Scheme and for inspiring me in many ways. I also thank Seppo Törmä for giving me the possibility to write this tutorial. Riku Saikkonen and Johan Wallén have been of irreplaceable assistance when it comes to proof reading and I am very grateful for their suggestions and comments. I also thank Timo Lilja and Arto Teräs for reading and commenting the tutorial.