Oh, boy, you should really finish reading the book! The second half is amazing. I just looked through the table of contents and almost all the things I remember

Oh, boy, you should really finish reading the book! The second half is amazing. I just looked through the table of contents and almost all the things I remembered most fondly are in chapters 3, 4 and 5. It's all about understanding computing paradigms and related concepts by implementing them. It does circuits, object-oriented programming languages, dataflow languages, logic programming, register machines, garbage collection, compilers, etc. Throughout the authors have very good taste in choosing the level of detail and realism in which to implement things to let you quickly get at the core ideas without getting bogged down in technical points. As for the first half only being fit for fortran-programming engineering students, I remember that very differently. I only remember a few examples as requiring calculus, say Newton's method, some numeric integration procedures, symbolic differentiation, power series implemented as lazy lists of coefficients, maybe one or two more. And other than the power series, I don't remember any of those examples as requiring more than just high school calculus ---which makes sense, because I think the course is meant for college freshmen, which will have only completed high school calculus, and probably are taking a more advanced calculus class concurrently. Although judging from my own undergraduate students it is probably best not to assume most students remember calculus from high school. Plus, I understand there are countries, such as the US, where calculus isn't even compulsory in high school! So maybe removing those few calculus examples would make the book seem friendlier and shorten it by 10 pages or so.