Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)

This book was a series of lecture notes and handouts when I attended school. I purchased a bound copy long after I'd take the course, to introduce my children to this way of thinking. Abstraction, Lisp, and the Object-oriented style of programming are all introduced. The problem sets go into useful application areas, and the writing style is straightforward. You may have to search a bit to find a vintage Scheme compatible with the exercises used in the book - people on the Internet (particularly the scheme community) are very helpful here.Good luck! This will change how you think about software, and in a mind-expanding way.

good for theoretical stuff but I would recommend the "Learn python/c/regex the Hard Way" series for beginners first. Skill is more useful than theory (except when it isn't). However this is a very readable book, and it really helps when watching the 80s Youtube lectures by the author, and with understanding how engineers think in general. There's a reason MIT posted his lectures online early, and why they recorded them in the first place.

great

The book never lives up to all the hype surrounding it. In fact, of the over 50 people I know who had the misfortune to study out of it, none liked it. I imagine only a few crazy souls who care about nothing but dry computer langague theory would even consider this worth reading.Recursion and information hiding via procedural/object code is nothing mysterious and is taught in all other CS classes, so the text adds nothing new. It merely retells the same old obvious programming techniques using a very poorly designed language (Scheme) and using completely uneducational examples. In short, this book is an overrated waste of time. If you are familiar with structured programming in a langauge like C++, you won't get anything new out of this. In fact, any topic presented here is better learned elsewhere, since the text is just one of those poorly written books that try to be encyclopedic at the expense of being interesting and thorough.

Scheme is a great language for writing Scheme interpreters and compilers. This book is just as self-referential as Scheme is. It is a book by MIT professors for an MIT class and is published by MIT Press. What works for a programming language doesn't work for a book.The class this book is designed for is on introductory programming. But don't expect to learn programming here. The authors have too many axes to grind to have time to worry about the best way to teach beginners about programming. They must point out that the C language suffers "defects" and that C programmers can be "reformed" by programming in Scheme. Every member of the MIT computer science department circa 1980 must show up somewhere in the footnotes, another distraction for the authors.There is plenty of good computer science here, but you already have to be a computer scientist to appreciate it. And the Scheme language is itself wonderful. Just don't try to learn it here.The teaching method used in the book is adding successive layers of abstraction. To the authors, the world beyond Cambridge, Massachusetts is nothing but a vague abstraction.

I'd like to point out the fact that this book gets mixedreviews for a very good reason. It's exceedingly boring andmuch of the information is completely worthless as far ascomputer science and programming in general is concerned.I read this text when I already had some introductory datastructures and algorithms knowledge, plus C++ experience.I couldn't believe some of the dumb things this book passedoff as good programming, not to mention how very inconvenientScheme is.So there you are, these authors present either simple ideas whicheveryone already knows, or they present interesting things insuch a way that no one can understand them, and on top of that,they use a language which is inappropriate for most of thealgorithms they show. If you pick up a book like "Algorithms"by Cormen, et.al. you'll see everything is in C-like pseudocode,and I don't know anyone who was able to successfully code thingslike Djikstra's algorithm in Scheme, and yet this is typical ofwhat programmers encounter in practice.In short, this book is pedantic drivel, only of interest tohardcore computer science majors who don't really care aboutcoding efficiency and elegance, and would rather waste timeformalizing basic ideas mathematically.

Was a secondhand copy, excellent condition. The removable book cover was slightly damaged, but the book was in pristine condition. Well worth the price.