I've been going through SICP for a year and a half now on and off. At this point I don't feel I've been getting back all the effort I put in it.

I think it's mostly recommended by people who didn't do all the exercises, or casually browsed through it and all they were left with was the fact that you can write a programming book without mentioning assignments until halfway through or that it's more easy to write a scheme interpreter in scheme than other languages.

But the book is really dense, and you won't be left with much after trying to debug your hundreds line script meant to solve one problem.