OT: Learning Scheme without mathematics

[Ken Restivo]

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I want to learn GnuCash well enough to be able to customise it. I need to write a bunch of scripts to tweak the data that was imported from my bank(s). But I'm not ready. I first need to learn Scheme/Guile well enough to know what is going on.

I'm not a mathematician. I got as far as algebra. I don't have a CS degree. I'm a lowly sysadmin with workmanlike, self-taught C, Perl, bash, and SQL skills. Most of the roughly 100,000 lines of code I've written over the past 4 years is geared to system tasks, text processing, I/O, web stuff, and GTK+ and ncurses UI. Pedestrian, mundane stuff. That's my skill level.

I've found several excellent Scheme tutorials (the SICP book, the MZscheme stuff, etc) but they all seem targeted to CompSci students who are strong in advanced mathematics. Since I'm a mathematical idiot, these tutorials confuse rather than educate me.

Where should I look for simple, practical examples of Guile for system, GUI, or text-processing tasks? I heard that the Guile interpreter could be used for dynamically building and testing GUI's using GTK+, thought this was a very cool idea, but haven't found any example programs or tutorials on it. Likewise, g-wrap seems like it could be much more powerful than Perl's xs stuff, but I'd still need to see some simple examples of how to use it.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, not typing in exactly the right Google magic, or haven't dug around in /usr/share/doc enough yet. If so, I apologise. But if someone could aim me in the right direction, I'd get there a lot faster.

Thanks!

- -ken
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