A comprehensive first course in Scheme, covering all of its major features: abstraction, functional programming, data types, recursion, and semantic programming. Although the primary goal is to teach students to program in Scheme, this will be suitable for anyone taking a general programming principles course. Each chapter is divided into three sections: core, appendix , and problems. Most essential topics are covered in the core section, but it is assumed that most students will read the appendices and solve most of the problems - all of which require short Scheme procedures. As well as providing a thorough grounding in Scheme, the author discusses different programming paradigms in depth. An important theme throughout is that of "meta-programming", thus providing an insight into topics such as type-checking and overloading which might otherwise be missed.