Get the latest tech news
SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)
f my students earlier, and lent him a book to read over summer. It was only after he’d left that I realised that — for me at any rate — the book I’d given him is probably the most seminal work in the whole of computer science, and certainly the book that’s most influenced my career and research interests.
What I mean by that is that SICP starts out by introducing the elements of programming — values, names, binding, control and so on — and then runs with them to explore a quite dazzling breadth of issues including: The “how to” aspect of computer science re-appears everywhere in this: in describing the behaviours of sensor networks that can adapt while continuing the reflect the phenomena they’ve been deployed to sense; in the interpretation of large-scale data mined and mashed-up across the web; in capturing scientific methods and processes for automation; and so forth. The richness of these domains mitigates against packaged software and encourages integration through programming languages like R, so that the interfaces and structures remain “soft” and open to experimentation.
Or read this on Hacker News