This book was inspired by the Little Schemer series of books, may it be similarly unique and fun. The style is a blend of the Socratic dialogue from it, and literate programming. It is presented in a code review format, which is a common way for programmers to work together.

Each section is presented as a branch, within which each chapter is one code review. Unlike traditional code review, these are more aimed at teaching rather than ensuring style fits, and there are no obvious bugs in the code.

This book assumes some basic knowledge about how to edit text files, and how to run commands from the command line. To follow along, you will also need the following programs: a C compiler (I have used GCC while writing this book, but Clang should work fine); and a Unix make program (I have used GNU make, if you are using BSD make and something doesn’t work, please open an issue on GitHub). If you are on Linux or macOS then these are probably already installed. If you are on Windows, I recommend the Windows Subsystem for Linux (version 2, also called WSL2).

You should also have some awareness of how git groups changes into commits, and how code review then consists of other programmers looking at those changes. While you don’t need knowledge of git itself to just read the book, it might help if you want to follow along with the book. There is the official tutorial, as well as a lot of other resources online.

I should point out, that the code review in this book is not typical, it is a teaching aid – normally code review is there to catch mistakes and style inconsistencies.