Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
One of the Best Books about Thinking about Programming, 4 Dec 2001
By A Customer
This is a book that will change your perception of how to program, and what a program is really doing. It can't be read casually because it is important to think carefully about what the authors are saying.The book illustrates how programming can be raised from writing a series of instructions minutely detailing how to do a task, to the higher level of simply specifying what should be done. If you look at the other reviews, you will see that this book receives either 5 stars, or just 1. I would suggest that if you understand what this book is about, then you will also give it a 5 star rating.
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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
Finally a good introduction to programming, 3 May 2000
By A Customer
I am sure this book made excellent reading for any student taking Computer Science. But as I am studying on my own, I too find this book the best on the market. The exercises, the examples are all very rich and get to the point quickly. The book is very well supported by its website. The presentation is very fluent, clarity is its best feature. I feel I can finally learn the basics without being drown into lots of particularisations. This book feels more like the algebra of programming as opposed to many other programming books I've read which mainly give 'numerical examples', to keep the analogy. If basic maths (A level maths should be enough) is something you don't have much in common with than you may find this book hard to follow. Maybe a different approach may be of more use to you. But if like me you had a more consistent mathematical background, than this book is exactly what you need to get you into programming with no waste of time and effort.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
SICP is rewarding despite dense and rigorous reading., 14 May 1997
By A Customer
Being a Freshman at MIT and having to use SICP as the textbook for my Intro to Comp. Sci. class, I have a passing urge to really slander this book. It is certainly very rigorous reading, with concepts and examples presented in the manner of a a gushing fire hydrant. From the opening concepts of abstraction and compound procedures, SICP builds at a blazing pace, covering much more than just the basic material one would expect from a first-semester Comp. Sci. class, including topics which ought to be tucked away in later courses such as streams, register machine code, and compilation. However, the rewards of keeping up with the pace of SICP are tremendous, as the reader will undoubtedly have gotten quite a firm grasp of computer science and its challenges (Abelson and Sussman have included some of the on-going research topics of Comp. Sci. in SICP as exercises). SICP is a treausre of knowledge waiting to reward those willing to suffer in reaching it. I have personally both suffered and been rewarded. And if I ever get thirsty now, I have learned the art of drinking out of a spewing fire hydrant.
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