How to Design Programs

Blurb

How to Design Programs is a textbook by Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt and Shriram Krishnamurthi on the systematic design of computer programs published in 2001 by MIT Press. The book introduces the concept of a design recipe, a six-step process for creating programs from the problem statement. While the book was originally used in conjunction with the TeachScheme! project, it has been adopted at a number of colleges and universities for the teaching of program design principles.
According to HtDP, the design process starts with a careful analysis of the 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 therefore carefully introduces more and more complex kinds of data, which sets it apart from every other introductory programming book. It starts from atomic forms of data and then progresses to compound forms of data, including data that can be arbitrarily large.