Name: Anonymous 2019-06-17 14:44
There's no useful material here, whatever your level of sophistication. Beginners will find that Scheme, and the book's approach in general are confusing. Those who are advanced will find the text is full of bull, and a book like "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen et.al. will provide you with many more theoretical and practical topics alike, but it's advanced (and hence more interesting than SICP drivel). If you are a beginner, "C++ how to program" by Deitel will teach you all about object oriented and top down programming, plus you'll learn the C++, the most common language out there.
Whatever is presented, is of such poor quality, and so dry, I couldn't stay awake long enough to finish my assignments. You can learn how to be a good programmer from any computer science course or text, and there are only several sections about that in this book. If you are looking for interesting theoretical ideas, look for other texts, such as the ones mentioned above.
From what I've read, I get the impression this book was written in a rush, and with the purpose of cramming tons of nonsense and filler in just to have an excuse to present Scheme (a pathetic language). The authors claim to present a view of programming that's widely applicable, and state that top-down (i.e. procedural) programming is by far not the best way to think about programs abstractly. Well, they don't stick to their promise. They present a biased, one sided promotion of scheme as the best language out there. No attempt is made to make comparisons between functional languages like scheme and normal languages like C. The end result, you come out knowing scheme and a few boring applications of it, but can't apply any of it to real programming tasks. This proves this book is just a fancy concotion of some egghead professor who has no idea what happens in the real world. I found many explanations to be incoherent and contradictory. The whole approach is divorced from the computing practice. This is no 21 day book, in fact, you can spend 21 months on it and still not learn a thing, because there's nothing but worthless garbage here.
Whatever is presented, is of such poor quality, and so dry, I couldn't stay awake long enough to finish my assignments. You can learn how to be a good programmer from any computer science course or text, and there are only several sections about that in this book. If you are looking for interesting theoretical ideas, look for other texts, such as the ones mentioned above.
From what I've read, I get the impression this book was written in a rush, and with the purpose of cramming tons of nonsense and filler in just to have an excuse to present Scheme (a pathetic language). The authors claim to present a view of programming that's widely applicable, and state that top-down (i.e. procedural) programming is by far not the best way to think about programs abstractly. Well, they don't stick to their promise. They present a biased, one sided promotion of scheme as the best language out there. No attempt is made to make comparisons between functional languages like scheme and normal languages like C. The end result, you come out knowing scheme and a few boring applications of it, but can't apply any of it to real programming tasks. This proves this book is just a fancy concotion of some egghead professor who has no idea what happens in the real world. I found many explanations to be incoherent and contradictory. The whole approach is divorced from the computing practice. This is no 21 day book, in fact, you can spend 21 months on it and still not learn a thing, because there's nothing but worthless garbage here.