SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)

I don’t quite get the cult status of SICP. I read it and it’s a fine beginner programming book, but nothing more.

Just so we're clear, this is a "beginner programming book" that has you create a scheme interpreter, then a register machine simulator, then a compiler out of your interpreter that will then have its compiled code run on the register machine simulator, by the final chapter.

This is probably the part where you'd step up and post a link to your repo with solutions to the exercises to back up your talk, but generally I only see this sort of casual dismissal from people who haven't actually worked through the book.

I commend your righteous indignation. Made me smile. Flame on!

I don’t understand this comment. If you master the material you know more than 90% of engineers in the field.

> If you master the material you know more than 90% of engineers in the field.

Telling someone that he/she is smarter than 90% of the people is not a praise. :-)

amen… just look at 90% of people at the DMV :-)

One aspires to be a hater of such high caliber.

Concrete Abstractions, Schematics of Computation and others from the era (also using Scheme) covered similar ground (and went far further!) SICP is denser and sticks to theory forgoing databases, operating systems and actually implementing scheme in assembly.