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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

Abelson and Sussman expect you to either be a bachelor's degree candidate with a lot of time to work on this

I think that's to be expected for a university course textbook.

No doubt, it wasn't intended as a negative. But for the independent student, stating what may seem obvious can be critically necessary. Compared to both O'Reilly titles and plenty of assigned course readings, that wasn't entirely clear to me until I had a few problem sets done. For example, Norvig's review makes it sound like it can be read lightly. Maybe only if your name is Norvig. I don't know.

Maybe the CTM book might be something for you as well. See my other comment[1] to learn more about it. Norvig says[2] the following about it:

    Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming (Van Roy
    & Haridi) is seen by some as the modern-day successor to Abelson &
    Sussman. It is a tour through the big ideas of programming,
    covering a wider range than Abelson & Sussman while being perhaps
    easier to read and follow. It uses a language, Oz, that is not
    widely known but serves as a basis for learning other languages.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2848027

[2] http://norvig.com/21-days.html

This tends to be the style of thinking at MIT, i.e. oh these are undergrads with a bunch of time, they should be able to do learn everything really well, thoroughly, and from the ground up! The end result is a bunch of classes that pack a lot of punch. This is great once you're ready to learn things inside out and from the bottom up, but not so great if you're new to the area or just trying to get a quick overview to get you off the ground.

Just about every class at MIT is like this. That is, professors assume you have the time and energy to learn things the "right way" and will really give you everything they've got. They usually forget the fact that students have usually 3 or 4 other classes like this which makes for quite a tough curriculum.

I personally loved this aspect of MIT. It's not the most practical or concise way to do things, though. If you're new to CS or just looking to get up on something quickly, definitely don't feel bad to look elsewhere.

Hmm, it took me about 6 months to get through SICP the first time. I worked on it probably about an hour a day and more on weekends. I wouldn't worry about trying to understand everything the first time through. I got much more out of subsequent readings.

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