tibbetts's Journal: Reading list: SICP

The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

by Hal Abelson, Gerald Sussman, and Julie Sussman

SICP, as it's affectionately known by the first-year MIT CS majors who have to learn from it, is a remarkable textbook. It's remarkable because it's almost completely unlike any other CS textbook, in that it borrows from the humanities in its comprehensive approach to the science in Computer Science. This isn't a how-to manual for how to program an OpenGL-based 3D renderer, nor does it does it describe the latest advances (?) in operating systems technologies. Instead, it offers practical advice in the craft of thinking through problems and finding elegant solutions to them. If SICP were a novel, its "plot" would involve creating a compiler for a Prolog-like logical programming language. But to reduce it to that is like reducing The Oddysey to a story about some dude who gets lost on the way home from a war, eventually finds his way home, and opens a can of whoop-ass on some guys who are hitting on his wife. Like The Oddysey, it's the details in SICP that are the most interesting. The authors walk the reader through all of the little things that go into building a program, and these include the most fundamental concepts in a programmer's toolbox: functions, variables, assignment, recursion, data structures, algorithms, compilers, grammars, and much more. The only thing that it'd need to be qualify as a humanities textbook is to have the key terminology printed in boldface, a few colorful call-out boxes with three-paragraph biographies of famous computerists, and a couple of student workbooks.

I started reading this sometime back in September or October, when I was still taking the train in to work every day. Now that I'm no longer doing that, it'll be slow going to finish this.