The scheme cookbook is sort of old and out of date. I believe it targets a pretty old version of plt scheme (v301) (now racket which is at version 5). Anything that uses set-cdr! will not work and a great deal of the api has changed since then. It would be great if someone updated it for the latest version of racket.

I started going through the sicp and was looking for a good ide for scheme. Any thoughts? Is racket the be all end all or is the something else to manage those parens?

I've been doing the same. Racket using Module language works so far for SICP, and is a good learning environment, as intended.

It might be better to take the opportunity to learn Emacs though, since it is the Lisp editor.

I was thinking about giving emacs a go as I started a while ago getting proficient in vim and told myself that I would try out emacs after I got fairly good in vim.

Racket has a SICP language level that you can install from Planet.

Definitely not. Emacs is the most popular lisp editor. I've recently grown to like vim though.

Is vim support for scheme/lisp good out of the box or does it require a bunch of plugins to get any type of workflow?