$ cat /home/buntine/mind_melting_brilliance

If you're like me, you've probably read the first 150 pages of SICP (The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) about three times. Personally, I find that it starts out extremely easy, but quickly becomes difficult. After a while I find that I am still reading, but not a whole lot is making sense to me. It's as though there is an underlying peice of knowledge that the authors assume I possess, which I don't.

I am of the school of "SICP should be read by all programmers". But I think my exact statement would be: "SICP should be read, and understood, by all programmers".

If we take a look on Amazon, we will see the strange mix of reviews SICP has received thus far (stars/reviews): 5/89, 4/8, 3/8, 2/3, 1/53

What?? So, I guess this implies that people either LOVE or HATE this book. If you go through the reviews in detail, you can see that a lot of the 1-star reviewers are upset with the text because it's simply too abstract and they do not leave with any confidence. I feel it is also worth mentioning that this text has received an elitist badge in our industry. If you read it, watch the lectures, and brainwash yourself into thinking you understood everything, you are now part of the genius club and can start quoting Paul Graham and Peter Norvig.

Enter Simply Scheme (Brain Harvey, Matthew Wright. 2nd ed, 1999, MIT press). A fundamental computer programming textbook for those of us who have trouble tackling SICP (and also for the people who, out of fear, pretend they could). According to the authors, SS was actually written as a pre-cursor to SICP. This textbook presents all the major concepts in a much more digestible way than SICP. This is good news!

As a word of warning, it's worth knowing that SS does use Scheme, but it teaches a slightly modified version of it. You will learn effective program design, but not the inner workings of Scheme itself. I already knew scheme when I started this book, and it annoyed me a little at the beginning, but I quickly got used to it.

The entire text is available free on the web. Take a look: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/ss-toc2.html.

I have also spent a lot of my freetime publishing my answers to all of the exercises at the end of each chapter. You can take a look at my solutions here: http://github.com/buntine/Simply-Scheme-Exercises (perhaps you can fork me and juxtapose your own solutions??). I hope this can help someone in their travels.

So, once you get through Simply Scheme, you may be much better suited to properly tackle SICP and finally become a master craftsman!