|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
|
Product Description
From Amazon
The authors employ this philosophy in their writing technique. The text asks the broad question "What is programming?" Having come to the conclusion that programming consists of procedures and data, the authors set off to explore the related questions of "What is data?" and "What is a procedure?"
The authors build up the simple notion of a procedure to dizzying complexity. The discussion culminates in the description of the code behind the programming language Scheme. The authors finish with examples of how to implement some of the book's concepts on a register machine. Through this journey, the reader not only learns how to program, but also how to think about programming. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Book Description
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs has had a dramatic impact on computer science curricula over the past decade. This long-awaited revision contains changes throughout the text.There are new implementations of most of the major programming systems in the book, including the interpreters and compilers, and the authors have incorporated many small changes that reflect their experience teaching the course at MIT since the first edition was published.A new theme has been introduced that emphasizes the central role played by different approaches to dealing with time in computational models: objects with state, concurrent programming, functional programming and lazy evaluation, and nondeterministic programming. There are new example sections on higher-order procedures in graphics and on applications of stream processing in numerical programming, and many new exercises.In addition, all the programs have been reworked to run in any Scheme implementation that adheres to the IEEE standard.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Classic,
By paul graham (Cambridge, MA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, 2nd Edition (Hardcover)
This is one of the great classics of computer science. I bought my first copy 15 years ago, and I still don't feel I have learned everything the book has to teach.I have learned enough to write a couple books on Lisp that (currently) have four to five stars. Yet SICP, which is pretty much the bible of our world, has only three? How can this be? Reading the reviews made it clear what happened. An optimistic professor somewhere has been feeding SICP to undergrads who are not ready for it. But it is encouraging to see how many thoughtful people have come forward to defend the book. Let's see if we can put this in terms that the undergrads will understand -- a problem set: 1. Kenneth Clark said that if a lot of smart people have liked something that you don't, you should try and figure out what they saw in it. List 10 qualities that SICP's defenders have claimed for it. 2. How is the intention of SICP different from that of Knuth? Kernighan & Ritchie? An algorithms textbook? 3. Does any other book fulfill this purpose better? 4. What other programming books first published in the mid 1980s are still relevant today? 5. Could the concepts in this book have been presented any better in a language other than Scheme? 6. Who is al? Why is his name in lowercase?
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great book and a magnificent vocational test,
By
This review is from: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, 2nd Edition (Hardcover)
SICP is an excellent, perhaps the best, advanced introduction to computer science and programming. It covers topics such as functional abstraction, data abstraction, OOP, program design, constraint programming and logic programming, always from a language design point of view. You will need a decent mathematical background to follow it.If it's such a great textbook, then why half of the reviewers hate it? Elementary: SICP is not just a textbook, it's also a Computer Science aptitude and vocational test. If you read it and like it, then Congratulations! You are a real programmer and computer scientist, with hair on your chest. If you don't like it, then you should be studying something else. Law, mortuary science, whatever, but not CS.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The usefulness of this book is not immediately obvious.,
By
This review is from: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, 2nd Edition (Hardcover)
This book is not about learning lisp. It's even only fringely about learning how to program. What's contained in it is more than a simple description of abstraction, or modularity, or anything else you'd find in an introductory text. It even escews talking about those concepts in their simplest form to a degree. It approaches them from a 50,000 foot level, discussion how everything is an abstraction, and by layering these abstractions we can build comprehensible programs. This book has the possibility to change how you think if you listen to it.That being said, it is _not_ a book on how to build software. I've seen many good software engineers discard this book because most of the code presented has no business anywhere near a real software engineering project. Even a lot of the concepts portrayed don't belong in day to day use. But at the end of the day, this book gets the closest I've seen to explaining the hard parts of computer science and software engineering. It's a book about patterns without explicitly discussing them. It's a book about how design software without much explicit discussion of the design process. Much like some of the abstractions and "meta" concepts that it presents, it's a book that teaches you how to learn how to learn about programming...
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
Most recent customer reviews |
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
|
