Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

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View books by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman.

Old school, hardcore computer science - Rated
I would hate to see the code from the reviewer who thinks recursion is no longer a valid topic for computer programming.

I agree with some of the other comments, this book is old school, but is that a bad thing. There are a lot of CS students graduating these days with little understanding of the basic. How many understand pointers, ( or even recursion ) for that matter.

Its interesting but a lot of the top programmers seem to have graduated the MIT course, few of them have a Computing & Business Studies degree !!!

Buy this book, work through it slowly, and enjoy the brain twisting knowledge you gain from it when you get to the end

Not for beginnners! - Rated
I am doing a first year Computer Science degree.. This books is always recommended as being the best not only to learn scheme but also to program for beginners. I used it only once, because I found the level in it too high. I will suggest to buy the book only if u have programmed before in any other high-level language. Those students from my course who had experience found the book very interesting and thought that it went into good detail unlike maybe other scheme books.

Try before buying - Rated
I haven't read the book and find it hard to know what it's all about because the reviews are so polarized. But I've learned that the book is used in an MIT course called 6.001. If you search the web for that you'll find the course's homepage with an ONLINE COPY of the book. There you can see for yourself if you like it. You can also download additional material including Scheme.

Long winded and irrelevant. - Rated
Fails to explain simple concepts simply. Lingers over concepts that are not that useful in the real world (recursion, lazy evaluation). Fails to explore some major concepts (useability, system specification) adequatly. Scheme is the wrong tool to explain OO concepts, the rest of the world has moved onto better languages. This book is stuck in 1985. This book should be retitled Structure and Interpretation of Unmaintainable Bloatware.

One of the Best Books about Thinking about Programming - Rated
This is a book that will change your perception of how to program, and what a program is really doing. It can't be read casually because it is important to think carefully about what the authors are saying.

The book illustrates how programming can be raised from writing a series of instructions minutely detailing how to do a task, to the higher level of simply specifying what should be done.

If you look at the other reviews, you will see that this book receives either 5 stars, or just 1. I would suggest that if you understand what this book is about, then you will also give it a 5 star rating.