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Great course, I took it a few years ago while working full time and loved it. I recommend this right alongside SICP for the engineer who wants to dig deeper.

• trenchgun 4y ago
  What does SICP offer that this book does not?
  • skrishnamurthi 4y ago
    SICP is mainly a book about how to structure systems. It also tells you how languages work, but in far less detail. PLAI (this book) teaches you how languages work. It also tells you a bit about how to structure systems, but that is not its goal. In part that is not a goal because of the existence of books like SICP and, increasingly, DCIC [https://dcic-world.org/ https://dcic-world.org/].
    • trenchgun 4y ago
      You are right. I have now binged 2/3 of PLAI. It is really nice in how it draws the landscape of programming languges and how they work. It of course also has an advantage being a newer book, programming languages and their theory have progressed quite a lot since writing of SICP. Also it is some how pedagogically really nice, very approachable and readable.
    • gavinray 4y ago
      Oh wow. If I was an educator, this book "A Data-Centric Introduction to Computing" is what I would put in front of people first. Everything you do in software is in service of moving and munging of data, programming paradigms are tools secondary to that.