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Layout of this Manual
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This manual is divided into six parts.

*Part I: Introduction to Guile* provides an overview of what Guile is
and how you can use it.  A whirlwind tour shows how Guile can be used
interactively and as a script interpreter, how to link Guile into your
own applications, and how to write modules of interpreted and compiled
code for use with Guile.  All of the ideas introduced here are
documented in full by the later parts of the manual.

*Part II: Guile Scheme* documents the core Scheme language and features
that Guile implements.  Although the basis for this is the Scheme
language described in R5RS, this part of the manual does not assume any
prior familiarity with R5RS in particular, or with Scheme in general.
Basic Scheme concepts, standard aspects of the Scheme language and
Guile extensions on top of R5RS are all documented from scratch, and
organized by functionality rather than by the defining standards.

*Part III: Guile Modules* describes some important modules, distributed
as part of the Guile distribution, that extend the functionality
provided by the Guile Scheme core, most notably:

   * the POSIX module, which provides Scheme level procedures for
     system and network programming, conforming to the POSIX standard

   * the SLIB module, which makes Aubrey Jaffer's portable Scheme
     library available for use in Guile.

*Part IV: Guile Scripting* documents the use of Guile as a script
interpreter, and illustrates this with a series of examples.

*Part V: Using Scheme with C -- A Portable Interface* shows how to call
Guile from your application's C code, and how to add new Scheme level
procedures to Guile whose behaviour is specified by application
specific code written in C.  The Guile interface functions documented in
this part of the manual make up a high level, portable interface which
(we hope) will also someday work with other Scheme interpreters,
allowing you to write C code which will work with any of several Scheme
systems.

The portable interface is rich enough to support simple use of Guile as
an application extension language, but is limited by its own portability
where a deeper integration is desired between Guile and your
application's code.  *Part VI: Using Scheme with C -- Guile's
Interface* documents a second, more extensive set of interface functions
that allows you to use more of Guile's C level features, and to extend
your application in more complex ways than is possible with the portable
interface.

Finally, the appendices explain how to obtain the latest version of
Guile, how to install it, where to find modules to work with Guile, and
how to use the Guile debugger.