I'm close the finishing the last major chunk of the book. Working with two colleagues for around two hours a week, its taken us nearly a year to get this far. Of course, we did every exercise, and lost a lot of time trying to work around incompatibilities between standard Scheme and the interesting corners of DrScheme [now DrRacket - mcons, I'm looking at you]. Now we use mit-scheme and I wish we had done so from the very beginning.

I don't think the book is perfect. I found the structure of Chapter 4, where a Scheme interpreter is built, confusing and irritating. The exercises are interspersed with the text in a way that doesn't allow you to test any of your solutions unless you read ahead to get more infrastructure. This seems deeply unREPLy to me. Once I had typed in enough of the supporting code to actually run my proposed solutions, and pulled some hair out debugging my broken code, I had some marvellous moments of epiphany. That Ahah! is what maks the book's reputation, and what makes the effort worthwhile. But it could have been better.

As a group, we're not sure where to go next.

My day job involves hacking my way around >>10e6 lines of C. Even now, I don't feel that I understand the idioms of Scheme-in-the-Large in anything like the same way. I'm not sure any book can give you that. I probably need to write some code to solve a real problem first.

So if any of you have completed [the] SICP, what did you read next that seemed to be a good continuation of your education?

c