SICP is hard but remarkably complete. If you are vaguely familiar with the maths that is chosen as the domain then you can mostly begin the course from scratch.

SICP is hard but remarkably complete. If you are vaguely familiar with the maths that is chosen as the domain then you can mostly begin the course from scratch. It starts with some really simple stuff like (+ 2 2) Then introduces some concepts like recursion along the way. Next you get data structures and recursive data structures before they pull off the greatest recursive magic trick to show that your code is data itself. Along the way you get a pretty accessible intro to functional programming without having to get bogged down in types, proofs and monads because Scheme is actually imperative. With my teacher hat on, this is a masterwork for pulling together so many concepts into one (relatively) tiny standalone course. With my student hat on it is profound on so many levels. I learn something new each time, even if only to appreciate names like Church and Curry being namedropped as bits of history because I'm not thinking a million miles an hour to process all the new information. The passion Sussman and Abelson bring the the course is authentic, endearing and unfakeable - you know they really felt it. In terms of what you do day in day out, SICP would be my go to for covering most the fundamentals of "computational thinking". You learn how basic algorithms and space/time complexity, recursion and iteration, functions and objects, data structures and finally program language construction (with some teeny peaks at the machine itself). And I was able to learn all this without a computer - using just pen and paper because Scheme is so simple. This freed me up from the distraction of trying to make a computer do something and actually using my mind to reason. As someone who did not do a CS degree there are not many other resources that are that high up for grounding you in all those subjects to get you ready for the job or put you on the path for further reading. Homoiconicity itself is such a mind bendingly pleasing thing to encounter the first time round, the only thing that came close was the stack machine - presumably because the list and the stack encapsulate something primitive to computation and language. I remember the first time the penny dropped when I realized that the cons operator for a list was also the spread operator for arguments in a function signature and thinking whoaaaaa