SICP
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
 
The Abelson/Sussman book book
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (usually
shortened to just "SICP") can change the way you think about
programming. It's famous as being the first year course
6.001 CS book at MIT but
is used in
quite a few other universities as well. It's not an easy book to
read - I tried to read it as one of my first Lisp texts but
struggled too much with it. I came back to the book after I had
consumed a number of other Lisp texts and the "lights came on" for
me when I read it that time. I found that reading it in
conjunction with watching the
Abelson/Sussman online video lectures worked best for me. The book is available in a number of different formats: dead tree, HTML, PDF, and Texinfo. In additional to the Abelson/Sussman online video lectures, there are a set of ArsDigita University lectures. I prefer the Abelson/Sussman videos but YMMV. The MIT 6.001 homework assignments and solutions and tutorial notes, exams, and quizes are useful for supplementary material if you're reading the book on your own. I particularly enjoyed going through the Spring 2000 lecture notes. Alternatively, you might want to have a look at notes and/or lectures from other universities that use SICP as a course textbook. The cs376 course on Programming Languages at Sewanee University is one such alternative. For teachers, there is an instructor' manual. The MIT page for SICP also has a link to the Scheme source code from the book. |
