Structure and Interpretation of Computer ProgramsBook
by Harold Abelson, 1985
Who uses, recommends or left Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.
Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology; author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.
loved
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) by Gerald Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson. SICP is my all-time favourite programming book. It's also where I learned about the power of wishful thinking when coding. SICP uses wishful thinking as a design tool: write code as if the abstraction already existed. Pretend. Then, once the ideal abstraction has taken shape, you go ahead and implement those functions. This meta-level is what made SICP so valuable. Ultimately, it's a book that teaches how to think about code and problem solving. I'm tempted to even say that SICP is more a work of art than a pure coding book, but I won't go there. A beautiful book.
A post naming the pre-2015 programming books that changed how he thinks about code, plus his take on the usual classics.
Interface designer and researcher known for Inventing on Principle and Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction; founder of Dynamicland.
loved
The essence of software engineering.
His 'Highly recommended things!' page — a five-star list he introduces as 'my favorite things in all the world', one line of his own commentary per item. The page carries no date; the earliest Internet Archive capture is 2011-05-25 and the page's own markup references an earlier /Links2007/ version.
Programmer and essayist, formerly of Amazon, Google and Grab; author of the Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and Stevey's Blog Rants essays.
loved
I went ahead and gave it another chance, and I was way wrong. It's awesome.
A dated note (12/13/2004) he added to the same post, reversing his earlier dismissal of SICP; the surrounding original text reads 'I never really cared for _SICP_.'
Statistician and software developer; chief scientist at RStudio/Posit and creator of the tidyverse of R packages.
recommended
But this book is very useful for somebody like me, with experience in high-level engineering languages, like VBA, PHP and R. They're incredibly useful languages, but ones that computer scientists generally disdain, because they're not theoretically pure or beautiful. This book shows you how languages can be constructed. The most valuable thing it gives you is confidence and knowledge to go and create your own programming language.
Five Books interview on computer science books for data scientists
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Hardware, services4 years
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