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Comment by jules | Hacker News Reader

I did SICP at the start of high school without any of these preparations and I'm not a genius. Some of the math was hard, but not too hard: just hard enough to learn a lot from it. You won't be able to read it like you read a novel, but I'd advise diving right into SICP and only using these additional materials if you really get stuck. I think you'll learn more per invested time.

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If you "did" this book at the age of 14 and came away with the idea that it was about "hard" math, your learning/time ratio might not have been as high as you imagined.

I think one of the wonderful qualities of SICP is that a determined 14 year old and an experienced programmer can both get a lot out of it. I also think the difficulty of the text is generally overstated.

I know the book is not about math (in fact I'm a math major now so I think I know what math is about ;), it was just that the mathy things were the hardest for me. For example understanding the O(log n) algorithm for fibonacci, the square root algorithm, series, exponentiation algorithm, newton's method, etc (especially since I had no idea what a derivative or exponentiation was). I suspect programmers with little math training will have similar difficulties.

How do you infer that "[SICP] was about 'hard' math" from "some of the math [in SICP] was hard," by the way?

You qualified your inference with a conditional (to be fair); but I still find the implication irritating.

The downvotes to my response to his self-proclaimed precociousness indicate that others find my implication to be 'irritating' as well. However, anyone who is bogged down in the math would most certainly benefit from the sources in this list, many of which are explicitly prepared to avoid the math difficulties. SICP is not the place to learn basic mathematics, and it seems to me that it would be distracting from their message.

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