Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Mit Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Series) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I have learned enough to write a couple books on Lisp that (currently) have four to five stars. Yet SICP, which is pretty much the bible of our world, has only three? How can this be?

Reading the reviews made it clear what happened. An optimistic professor somewhere has been feeding SICP to undergrads who are not ready for it. But it is encouraging to see how many thoughtful people have come forward to defend the book.

Let's see if we can put this in terms that the undergrads will understand -- a problem set:

1. Kenneth Clark said that if a lot of smart people have liked something that you don't, you should try and figure out what they saw in it. List 10 qualities that SICP's defenders have claimed for it.

2. How is the intention of SICP different from that of Knuth? Kernighan & Ritchie? An algorithms textbook?

3. Does any other book fulfill this purpose better?

4. What other programming books first published in the mid 1980s are still relevant today?

5. Could the concepts in this book have been presented any better in a language other than Scheme?

6. Who is al? Why is his name in lowercase?

Well, obviously not much dumber than you. You don't writing a think meta-circular interpreter would teach you anything about computer languages? (Isn't that the point?) Or programs expressed at the most mathematical level possible? You probably don't think learning about recursion is very important either. Oh yeah, that's just something you had to learn about when there weren't loops. Obviously, if all you do is hack perl scripts, don't buy this book. If you don't want to learn something really important that requires doing things a different way other than to which you're accustomed and getting at the basis of things, don't buy it.

The fact that the material in this book is taught to freshmen at MIT and Berkeley and other top computer science programs in the nation might say something to you. It may come off as archaic and worthless to some, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. The more I reflect on the things I learned from SICP, the more I realize they are important. The lambda calculus and scheme are simplicity and elegance at their finest. The difference between the understanding those people have of this material and that which is illustrated by the comments by 'programmers' here reminds me that they're right, this book isn't for programmers. It's for people who want to learn computer science.

I disagree strongly!

I think part of the problem is that it takes a bit of time to really "grok" Scheme. If you've never been exposed to it before (as I haven't), Scheme may seem strange and unnecessarily arcane to you at first. However, after doing it for a bit you will realize (as I have) that Scheme is amazingly flexible, succinct, powerful and unbelievably elegant. It incorporates all the features that other languages such as C++ take for granted and skip over, and exposes the real machinery behind them, without introducing a whole host of obscure syntactical details. This clarity and elegance of Scheme has helped me understand all other languages I have to deal with so much better!

Thus, in presenting the topics of this book in Scheme, the authors are actually succeding in making their discussions language-independent! Truly, the difference here lies in what your goals are: if you want to program in some specific language and just memorize it, this is not a book for you. However, if you actually want to understand how that language works, this will be akin to an epiphany for you. A very good book!