Hi.

I'd like to set some books free. Over the next few days, I'll make a series of posts describing the books. Any of these are available for a song—in exchange, absolutely anything will do. I'll ship them anywhere in the US; international shipments might be negotiable.

Two of the books are very fine books and are very dear to me; it's important that these go to a good home. The others can go to any taker. None are complete duds—except maybe for Nihonsense. The rest have had at least some value to someone at some point in history.

Let's start with the good ones:

• TAKEN The Schemer's Guide, Ferguson, Martin, Kaufman (0-9628745-7-4). Scheme is a programming language, possibly the most elegant ever created. For a while it was thought, by the enlightened, to be an excellent way to teach programming and CS, because it doesn't bother with any tricky syntax (its only significant symbols are parentheses) and focuses directly on the essential issues (recursion, data representation) and so on. There are a couple of fine books from which one can learn Scheme, and in my opinion this is one of the finest. Designed specifically for high-school students, it puts a premium on pedagogy and takes pains to teach concepts.

Imagine that one afternoon, while sunning yourself in the back yard, you are interrupted by a passing being from outer space who asks you to explain what a sentence looks like.

Ultimately, it has you building some noticable data structures, like trees and even stateful objects; and it covers higher-order functions, too. The book has excellent typography and is printed in two colors—red and black. I believe it's one of the masterworks of computer science education. Paperback, 328 pp. For you: $0.

• Nihonsense, Paul Meredith Stuart (4-7890-0349-3). Some sort of "humor" taking off on the supposed cultural gulf between Japanese and Americans. I didn't have the patience to finish the first paragraph. Got for me by someone who thought I was interested in "Japanese stuff." (Rachel, if you're out there, I love you even though you bought this book and moved to LA). Paperback, 242 pp. For you: $0.

• The South, Colm Tóibín (0-14-014986-4). A decent novel. I just didn't like it that much. Paperback, 238 pp. I'd like to discuss it with you. For you: $0.