On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 02:23:04PM -0800, Mark Schoonover wrote:
I never heard of these two books. I've looked at them quickly, and from what I can tell, they teach you Scheme in order to understand various computer science topics. The way I understand SICP is that they teach various computer science topics, then demonstrate that with Lisp. By going through SICP, you won't be a Lisp programmer necessarily. For myself, I'm more interested in the theory, and I really don't care what the language is used to demonstrate. Plus the history of the course, the available resources etc has me leaning more towards jumping straight in to SICP.
Good summary. SICP is a book about fairly hardcore computer science topics, that happens to use Scheme as the language. If your goal is to learn scheme, there are other books that do that better. SICP uses scheme because it is easier to get the language out of the way and focus on the concepts. Actually, the language is simple enough that in the course of the book, you end up implementing the advanced concepts instead of just using them in a larger language or library. Dave -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
