I basically agree. SICP makes a lot more sense when considered in the context of a course at MIT, taken after a first course in calculus. The exercises are easy

I basically agree. SICP makes a lot more sense when considered in the context of a course at MIT, taken after a first course in calculus. The exercises are easy to motivate if one can motivate the study of calculus (e.g. calculus is useful because X, therefore doing calculus by computer is useful because X but faster). The examples therefore feel relevant to what one knows and what one knows is useful (or at least considered useful by lecturers). I think it is hard to find good exercises for this sort of early computer science outside of mathematics sadly. It seems to me that there is less variety in the computational constructs one might use in solving problems about producing or processing text (which are concisely written and have a small solution), but I think the book does emphasise mathematical examples more than needed. For example there are other first examples of higher order functions than Newton Raphson, and proving things on the way to a logarithmic Fibonacci algorithm is largely irrelevant to the kind of computer science that people looking at Teach yourself Computer Science are interested in.