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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs has had a dramatic impact on computer science curricula over the past decade. This long-awaited revision contains changes throughout the text.
There are new implementations of most of the major programming systems in the book, including the interpreters and compilers, and the authors have incorporated many small changes that reflect their experience teaching the course at MIT since the first edition was published.
A new theme has been introduced that emphasizes the central role played by different approaches to dealing with time in computational models: objects with state, concurrent programming, functional programming and lazy evaluation, and nondeterministic programming. There are new example sections on higher-order procedures in graphics and on applications of stream processing in numerical programming, and many new exercises.
In addition, all the programs have been reworked to run in any Scheme implementation that adheres to the IEEE standard.
Have you read your SICP today?
| Customer Rating:  | | I read this book because it was assigned for a course in school and I feel that working through the book greatly increased my ability. Now that school's out I find myself wanting to conjure the spirits of the computer with my spells and asking people to `read SICP' in all kinds of conversation. |
go back to skool!
| Customer Rating: | i bought this after wanting to brush up on theory, algorithms, programming concepts and all the other Compsci stuff but didn't want to go back to skool.
this book really helps brush up on what you need to know and I would recommend that anyone taking compsci today get this book and work thru it in conjunction with your regular classes.
those of you who didn't go to compsci should get this book too.
You will learn a lot..but not how to spel! |
The one book *every* programmer must read
| Customer Rating: | My first encounter with SICP was in the second year of university, where I took a course named "SICP 1. I already had working programming experience by that time, so the course wasn't hard, but I was struck by the beauty of the subjects it taught, by the Scheme language it used and by the long and interesting homework assignments it had. This course woke my curiosity about functional programming, and the Lisp family of languages in particular.
A few years later, with much more experience behind my back, I've decided to tackle SICP seriously and read the whole book, solving the vast majority of the exercises. This endeavor took about 10 months, and I enjoyed it immensely. I think SICP is a wonderful book, a seminal work in the field of programming. It is one of those rare books every programmer should read. In this review I'll try to explain why.
In contrast with most introductory books about programming that just teach you a language, SICP takes a far better approach. The main goal of the authors is not to teach Scheme, it is to teach programming. From the beginning, the book takes an integrative path, where the basic axioms of programming are presented, and later are fortified with examples and exercises. SICP teaches about computational processes - iterative and recursive. How to use them best in each situation, and how to implement them. It also explains abstraction by functional composition. These are topics rarely presented in programming books, but SICP puts them rightly in the first chapter, because they are the real stuff programming is based on.
The example programs developed in the book are real, large, and exciting. You'll get to develop a powerful picture language, a generic object-oriented arithmetic package including complex and polynomial arithmetic, a simulator for digital circuits, a symbolic differentiation package, an interpreter for Scheme written in Scheme, an interpreter for a logic programming language similar to Prolog, a virtual machine for a simplified pseudo-assembly DSL, an interpreter for Scheme written in this pseudo-assembly, and finally a compiler from Scheme to the assembly language. All these examples are real, well-thought out exercises for skill, taken from beginning to a very complete end. In no other book such a wealth of topics is addressed in an accessible manner.
A word about exercises in SICP. They are numerous, some of them are hard, but the exercises are the best way to really understand what the book tries to teach. In a manner, they're as integral part of the book as the text itself. The exercises are very well prepared and lead the reader through the examples coded by the authors into greater understanding of the topics taught. At times, it feels like the exercises are specifically designed to force you to think about the essence of the topics, and not just grasp them superficially.
SICP commonly suffers from the criticism that it's too hard for beginners. Maybe this criticism is rightful, and universities should give a simpler introductory course to programming before SICP. But this is an aspect of the educational systems, not pertaining to the book itself. I wouldn't know, I never read SICP as a beginner. However it is being taught, SICP is an amazing book. It is by far the best programming book I have ever laid by hands on, and I seriously doubt that it will be surpassed any time soon. Reading SICP will enlighten you as a programmer, and make you a better one. I can't imagine one programmer who won't gain something important by reading SICP. |
Single most important CS book
| Customer Rating: | If you disagree, hopefully you're thinking Knuth. But consider this: Knuth is a wonderful bestiary of important programs and proofs; SICP is about the very nature of programming and programs.
If you're not thinking either, and no offense to K&R et al: Do yourself a favor, watch the videos. Sussman & Abelson are entertaining teachers. SICP is a difficult book, and seeing Sussman in a fez after the metacircular evaluator just... helps.
But of course Graham's and Norvig's reviews are gems of their own.
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this book saved my life
| Customer Rating: | So there I was, 18 years old, having been raised on a toxic stew of MS-BASIC, Apple II assembly and some MPW Pascal. My mind was poisoned. Everything I knew about programming was wrong. I read book after book on programming and CS, but none of them really seemed to make a real dent in my style.
Enter SICP. In a few months, this book reshaped my concept of what it meant to program a computer. It does not spend time teaching a language; Scheme is presented precisely because its syntax and commands can be covered in about ten minutes, and its structure becomes absolutely transparent within a few days of looking at Scheme code. It does not spend time walking the reader through common coding tasks, as a Learn X In 24 Hours text might.
SICP teaches the fundamentals of programming mastery. Abstraction, modularity, design paradigms, compilation and interpretation, and more topics are presented in a style which is exactly as simple as it can be, and no simpler. Scheme allows these topics to be covered without becoming mired in details which would otherwise plague the implementor.
It will not show you how to write a GUI, scrape a web page, develop a social networking website or create a network server. It will, however, guide a dedicated reader through an exploration of immensely powerful programming technique, and it will prepare the reader to solve any problem in any language for the future.
SICP is not a machine gun, putting power into casual hands. It is a light saber, rewarding discipline and practice with unstoppable capability. |
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