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Ask HN: Working through SICP. Did you make it?

5 points by simonista ↗ HN
For a variety of reasons, including an excellent comment about CS pedagogies from a few days ago, I've decided to learn scheme and work through SICP this summer. I remembered a thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=428248) where a bunch of HN people were going to work through it together and I'm curious about your experience.

Did you make it? If not, why? What resources did you find particularly helpful? I've got the pdf book and links to the old MIT video lectures and newer berkeley video lectures. What else should I have? What version of Scheme/Lisp/other language did you use? I'm trying to decide between MIT, UCB (STk), and PLT Schemes. Did the group experience work and was it helpful? What was the most difficult part?

Here's some further explanation about my language options. Tell me if you think I'm off base here. I listed those three Schemes for the following reasons. MIT because SICP uses it. UCB because the berkeley video lecture series uses it. PLT because I'm going to take a languages class in the fall from Matthew Flatt who is one of the members of the core PLT team. Another goal for the summer is to play with Impromptu (http://impromptu.moso.com.au/), so something that will ease that learning curve would be nice.

Thanks!

6 comments

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notaddicted
I worked through the first chapter slowly, and then quit and focused on school. Now I've bought the book, I'm still in chapter 2. Did I make it? No, I'm still working on it.

Advice: Ars longa, vita brevis, so work fast.

The only tool I found useful is the web browser in counter strike source, so I can combine two kind of stimulation at once... this is probably not of interest to anyone else.

aristus
Yep. The boss at the end is really hard. :)

I worked through the videos plus the book. The videos are essential, IMO. The Berkeley lectures were not as inspiring as the original MIT '86 ones.

bcater
At the time that I took 6.001 (the MIT version of the SICP course), PLT Scheme lacked several libraries that the book requires. Since so many students wanted to use PLT, the staff put together the extra modules for us, but I'm not sure if PLT is now "SICP-compliant" or not. Check with someone who works on PLT (they're very nice) to find out.

For what it's worth, I really enjoyed SICP, though I still can't say that I understand every line in it.

shubhamharnal
There's a book called "Simply Scheme" that is meant to serve as an introduction to SICP. So, you could "prep" yourself for your pursuits if you first go through this book. Good Luck, Shubham Harnal.