Accidental Technologist

Musings about Entrepreneurship, Technology and Software Development

  • Home
  • About
  • Still River Software
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Genesis

Read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs for Free on the iPad

August 24, 2012 by Rob Bazinet 2 Comments

Tweet

9780262011532 medium

I found out recently that one of the all-time classic book in computer science,?Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, is available in ePub format for free. ?The book is truly a classic but has been out of print for a long time now.

For those unfamiliar with the text, from Amazon’s site:

Abelson and Sussman’s classic Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs teaches readers how to program by employing the tools of abstraction and modularity. The authors’ central philosophy is that programming is the task of breaking large problems into small ones. The book spends a great deal of time considering both this decomposition and the process of knitting the smaller pieces back together.

The authors employ this philosophy in their writing technique. The text asks the broad question “What is programming?” Having come to the conclusion that programming consists of procedures and data, the authors set off to explore the related questions of “What is data?” and “What is a procedure?”

The authors build up the simple notion of a procedure to dizzying complexity. The discussion culminates in the description of the code behind the programming language Scheme. The authors finish with examples of how to implement some of the book’s concepts on a register machine. Through this journey, the reader not only learns how to program, but also how to think about programming.

The contents of the book are timeless and give computer scientists young and old a solid level of knowledge. ?It uses Scheme, a dialect of Lisp, but that should not deter readers as the lessons are universal.

The full text is also available to be read online for those not able to read in ePub format. ?Great stuff!

Share this:

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • More
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Pocket
  • Reddit

Filed Under: Programming Tagged With: book, lisp, scheme, sicp

Recent Posts

  • How to Fix Rails Flash Rendering When Using Hotwire
  • Hotwire Fix for CORS Error when using Omniauth
  • Fix Installation of Ruby using rbenv on macOS Big Sur
  • RailsConf 2021 and the Future of Conferences
  • Fixing Out of Diskspace Errors on Amazon EC2

Categories

Services I Love

HatchBox - Easy Rails Deploys Fathom Analytics
Follow @rbazinet

Rob Bazinet
@rbazinet

  • Exactly this…. https://t.co/yWj7fZ01HR
    about 17 hours ago
  • https://t.co/EmagdpLoNv "Introducing GitHub Copilot X · GitHub"
    about 1 day ago
  • RIP Gordon Moore: https://t.co/c5J9LaHrj8
    about 1 day ago
  • Our daughter works as a teaching assistant at a local K-8 public school. It’s become apparent that students today r… https://t.co/p2t912GVyc
    about 2 days ago
  • Working to wrap up my current consulting gig by mid-April. I will be looking for the next thing soon. If anyone has… https://t.co/sg3cSV9yqM
    about 3 days ago
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments
Find me on Mastodon