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Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman

49 people recommended it in 26 threads, 2007–2025.

What people on Hacker News said

nikcub
Even though I had worked through SICP I still watched all the lectures again and implemented all the examples with benchmarks and unit tests.

on HN, 2011

spacemanaki
There's over 200 pages before they even introduce mutation and impure functions. Later they touch on the thorny problems that mutation creates when they touch on concurrent programming.

on HN, 2011

JackMorgan
This book helped me think about how programs run, how state is stored, how you can build out asynchronous computation, and how you can build your own languages.

on HN, 2022

ThrustVectoring
This is a bit unorthodox, but I personally got a lot out of taking the LISP code in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and mentally translating the examples and solving the exercises in Javascript.

on HN, 2017

PeterWhittaker
SICP, JS edition (great read, I do a lot of JS work and I’ve learned a lot, despite time spent studying the language itself, and I’m still in the first chapter)

on HN, 2022

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