Structure and Interpretation of Computer Program (it's written in scheme but it's mostly for convenience and its lack of syntax).
Definitely the best book I've read on programming.
Definitely the best book I've read on programming.
I had very rose-tinted nostalgic memories. They did not hold up.
"How to Design Programmes" is a much better book. (But made for rank beginners.) And for the more advanced, "Types and Programming Languages".
See "Why Calculating is better than Scheming" (https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87....) for a critique.
Don't get me wrong, SICP is still a good book to have read. Just no longer my favourite.
Link?
While it certainly espouses a functional style, I found the greatest lesssons to be higher level, focusing on abstraction.
Though I have limited knowledge of C and Java so would be keen to hear your elaborated thoughts on this.
Also, as a beginner, you don't want both the difficulties of contepts _and_ the difficulties of language to combine to stop you from learning as effectively.
>Also, as a beginner, you don't want both the difficulties of contepts _and_ the difficulties of language to combine to stop you from learning as effectively.
Are you referring to the need to learn Scheme to work through SICP? While the asker specifically requested language-agnostic books, Scheme was chosen as a language for SICP for being a "syntax-free" language...
no, i'm referring to the fact that this book isn't language agnostic (i.e., you wouldn't want to use anything other than scheme/lisp).
First-class functions, lambdas, closures, lexical scoping, etc. Abelson wrote, for instance:
"6.001 differs from typical introductory computer science subjects in using Scheme (a block-structured dialect of Lisp) rather than Pascal as its programming vehicle. The subject's developers feel strongly that Pascal is hopelessly constraining, and that important ideas (such as functional programming and object-oriented programming) can be addressed within Pascal only awkwardly, if at all."
That's not particularly demanding requirement. The class began with a single lecture about how Scheme worked and after that Hal and Gerry assumed you knew all the language you needed to and dove in.
When the course was introduced (early 80s), most incoming MIT freshman had not programmed a computer (!), including those who planned to do course 6 (EE or CS -- 6.001 was a requirement for either degree).
IMO, you're supposed to write your own Scheme to reap full benefits from SICP.
The book contains a recipe for an interpreter that can be transferred to any other language. Chapter 5.4 : The explicit-control evaluator[0].
Strangely this fact is not advertised that much, I find it to be one of the coollest features of the book.
The implementation is not a direct syntax translation - one needs to figure out how to implement the base susbstrate and how to handle e.g. tokenization, but well rounded software engineer should have some model in ones head how to manage these (so if there are missing pieces this is a good opportunity to brush on those).
[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-34.htm...
I do not mean this as empty snark; it is something you can see across the board in programming language evolution. It is virtually impossible to propose a new general-purpose programming language today that does not have closure support, which is the biggest thing you're finding missing from C and Java to use the techniques in SICP. (It is not the only thing, but it is the biggest thing.) You'll note Java is going to bolt them on soon, or recently bolted them on, but it'll be another decade before Java is using them fluently either way.
I've often recommend SICP to self-taught programmers; it is not a complete substitute for a computer science education, but it is a concentrated dose of the stuff you're probably missing out on. Expect it to be the work of some months to work through it. However, in the end, a self-taught programmer who has also worked through SICP systematically and carefully is probably a better programmer than 80% of the modern computer science graduates nowadays. (If you want to avoid that fate, oh ye who are still in school, take the freaking compilers course at the very least. Do your peers complain that it is hard? Then maybe it is a good one.)
Any other general-purpose language you'd be inclined to pick up right now would be fine.
IIRC, you end up implementing a scheme, which you can do nearly in the language of your choice, then the book covers that language you are implementing.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/ch1-Z-G-1.gif
Etc.
Had it been optional, I would have been sorely tempted to skip it. But, taking it was probably good for me in the long run :)
It took me a while to understand that, if you’ve been raised on Java or C, these things are not obvious at all.