Peter Norvig Review of SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs)
amazon.com
amazon.com
> To use an analogy, if SICP were about automobiles, it would be for the person who wants to know how cars work, how they are built, and how one might design fuel-efficient, safe, reliable vehicles for the 21st century. The people who hate SICP are the ones who just want to know how to drive their car on the highway, just like everyone else.
That kind of summed up my experience with SICP for learning scheme. It won't really tell you how to get things done, but it does help you figure out how scheme works. Which for me at the time when I read it was exactly what I needed.
I never really considered SICP to be about learning Scheme / lisp and rather about how to think about various programming concepts.
I was actually thinking about this earlier today when I saw the revised version based on javascript. Personally I liked the fact that SICP used Scheme, a language I never use, as an example, because it took away any preconceptions I had about how to do things in the language, and let me focus on learning the concepts. I'm interested to see how that translates to javascript