From what I've read, I get the impression this book was written in a
rush, and with the purpose of cramming tons of nonsense and filler in
just to have an excuse to present Scheme (a pathetic language). The
authors claim to present a view of programming that's widely applicable,
and state that top-down (i.e. procedural) programming is by far not the
best way to think about programs abstractly. Well, they don't stick to
their promise. They present a biased, one sided promotion of scheme as
the best language out there. No attempt is made to make comparisons
between functional languages like scheme and normal languages like
C. The end result, you come out knowing scheme and a few boring
applications of it, but can't apply any of it to real programming
tasks. This proves this book is just a fancy concotion of some egghead
professor who has no idea what happens in the real world. I found many
explanations to be incoherent and contradictory. The whole approach is
divorced from the computing practice. This is no 21 day book, in fact,
you can spend 21 months on it and still not learn a thing, because
there's nothing but worthless garbage here.
Amazon.com's lead review of SICP
Don't be mislead by the review --- its the best introductory Computer Science textbook,
possibly the best textbook ever written for any field.
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University of Virginia CS 655: Programming Languages |
cs655-staff@cs.virginia.edu Last modified: Mon Feb 26 12:48:20 2001 |