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Abelson-Sussman's SICP is a steep learning curve for an absolute beginner: I'd recommend reading How To Design Programs first (and SICP right after), which is s
by lowlyscientist 15y ago
Abelson-Sussman's SICP is a steep learning curve for an absolute beginner: I'd recommend reading How To Design Programs first (and SICP right after), which is similar but a bit more gentle. It also uses Scheme, but focuses most at how to think about programming problems, and general "design recipes" for solving them.
- drostie 15y agoThat may be very good advice; I haven't seen How To Design Programs. While the SICP lectures do in fact have a ridiculously huge scope, I was also surprised when rewatching them -- mostly with how basic they were when they started. "Here's adding, here's subtracting, here's what a lambda is." One thing that's nice about SICP is that assignment is very consciously "added on later." I wouldn't have expected them to be beginner material either, but then I met a nice gal named emma on Freenode's ##club-ubuntu IRC channel, who was using SICP to learn programming. I remember remarking that this must be very hard and she didn't understand why it should be.
- lowlyscientist 15y agoThat's true, I do recall skimming through the very early parts of SICP. I'm jealous of Emma, I bet that would be a really strong base for building programming skills.