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The thing that really turned me off of this book is that the exercises are way more complicated than the material itself. They made me feel like an idiot and l

by tieTYT 13y ago

The thing that really turned me off of this book is that the exercises are way more complicated than the material itself. They made me feel like an idiot and like I wasn't learning. To put it in terms of Kathy Sierra, this book didn't make me feel like "I'm awesome"[1]. Here's a satirical example: > Now that you've learned how to sum an arbitrary list of numbers together, use this knowledge to prove Einstein's general field of relativity. How about instead of proving physics theories, we use our new knowledge to add together apples and oranges? That is easier for me to comprehend. I'm not saying this to troll. I know this book is supposed to be great and I plan to read it again. But I'd like to hear why my complaint didn't bother the people here that did finish and love this book. Should I just ignore the exercises? --- Edit: I want to clarify something. It wasn't that the exercises were too hard to answer. My complaint is that I couldn't even comprehend what some were asking me to do. To me, it was like the exercises were written in French, a language I don't speak. If I could understand what the exercises were asking for, then I could have realized I'm missing something and re-read the section. But as they were written, it made me feel like I should temporarily put the book down and re-take physics and calculus. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=eSlRd6MnDv8&t=479 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=eSl...

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ThatGeoGuy 13y ago
If I recall correctly, the book does mention that it was designed with students at MIT in mind. I also recall that the students finish a couple calculus courses before taking the SICP course, so the math contained therein isn't exactly new material to them. For the most part I believe you're mostly complaining about chapter 1 though, maybe chapter 2 when they talk about painters and the exercise with the chessboard. Those are two that come to mind that tend to be excruciatingly long and unnecessarily difficult for beginners. I would advise you to go through the book again, and while this does come off as somewhat snooty, I would say that if you don't understand the math or physics behind some of the exercises, then you should spend time trying to figure out the algorithms for them. Most of the value of the book is actually through the exercises, as typically those are the spots where you'll eventually start to have those "aha!" moments when working with scheme. As a disclaimer, I should point out that I had quite a bit of programming experience in C++, Python, and other OOP languages before trying SICP. Luckily, I never struggled with the math, and learning Scheme came quite naturally. However, the common problems associated with thinking in Lisp do apply, and it may take several cracks at the book before you really understand the beauty or essence of what SICP tries to teach.
anologwintermut 13y ago
That is the difference between computer science as an academic subject and programing as a profession. The attitude was "we expect you to learn the language, that's easy. Now we are going to make you actually think about hard problems." The book is not "The Structure and Interpretation of Rails/Flask/Struts/Ysod CRUD Apps" for a reason.
- mkmkmmmmm 13y ago
  That would be a valid argument if the GP was a physicist, I guess. Why should GR be a prerequisite for CS?
  - MoreConsiderate 13y ago
    Because GR is the basis for everything human. See Chimpanzee Politics, Schrödinger's cat, etc.
    - MoreConsiderate 13y ago
      Why was I downvoted? I believe I made an informed and appropriate point.
      - anigbrowl 13y ago
        I voted you back up. But the answer to your question is 'for the same reason you don't teach GR as a prerequisite to tying shoelaces.' Small children and shoelaces wouldn't be here without GR either, but it's just too abstract for most people. The problem for the poster above is that if you read SICP outside MIT or especially outside college, you're not surrounded by a bunch of science nerds who can be persuaded to explain general relativity in return for beer and a pizza. If you're not swimming in a sea of science, then problems involving the behavior of fish seem much trickier to solve. I've seen this problem iwth a few other MIT books, eg Horowitz and Hill.
        antimagic 13y ago
nilkn 13y ago
The exercises are amazing, and they give you a chance not just to grapple with the language but to think about some fascinating problems and in some cases learn new material outside of the text proper. It's assumed that picking up the syntax of the language will be the easy part. Some of them are pretty hard, but they are always more or less direct applications of the ideas discussed in the previous section or two. Relativity is not really in any sense a direct application of addition. That said, the book is definitely written for those who have an undeniable aesthetic sense for beautiful problems.
btilly 13y ago
The point of the exercises is that the book is trying to demonstrate a WAY of thinking. No amount of passively watching words pass by while you nod sagely at how obvious it all is is going to make your brain actually try to think that way. My experience is that once I actually understood the section, the exercises were usually not that hard. However it was very easy to read a section and only think that I understood it.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- flatline 13y ago
  I agree, and I love SICP, but it also assumes a general familiarity with undergraduate-level mathematics, up through calc 1 and linear algebra, as well as some basic number theory, that many people probably do not have and will immediately be intimidated by. Even though it does not rely heavily on these subjects, they are strewn throughout the work: the book was written at a time when the sole academic path in computing was as an engineering discipline, and the students all had a common background. The field of programming and, I would argue, computer science at large, is much more diverse now, and I think the text could have a broader reach with slightly different examples and exercises, and perhaps a bit more elaboration. Learning to model problems when you are both unfamiliar with the problem domain and the modeling tools is daunting, to say the least.
  - tieTYT 13y ago
    This guy gets it :) A familiar problem domain would have made the book very enjoyable.
wonnage 13y ago
It would be good to read it with a different mindset. Learning something requires you to feel stupid for a bit, otherwise it's no great feat to learn it (and consequently feel awesome). The problems are all doable, given the expected background of its readers, just not easy or straightforward. If you ignore them you're missing out on 75% of the material - a lot the hard problems require you to apply something from the text that wasn't spelled out for you explicitly.
- tieTYT 13y ago
  I didn't ignore them, that's why I eventually gave up. I really enjoyed the book material and the exercises I could understand. But when I ran into an exercise that made me feel like I need to take a non-programming course to comprehend, it was really demotivating.
agumonkey 13y ago
SICP carry some baggage I believe. Abelson and Sussman are Electronics Engineers, fond of mathematical way of thinking and culture thus applying computing to think about these fields. I think that's one reason behind the creation of How to Design Programs (HtDP, by Felleisen) which deals with abstractions and recursive problem solving but without involving complex maths or physics. Later on, you might appreciate SICP problems with less resentment.
sev 13y ago
Take this with a grain of salt, but IMO the reason some people who try to learn programming end up with this type of mindset is because they have a wrong mindset to begin with: they believe learning to program should be relatively easy and have an obvious and relatively simple path to mastery. From my experience, this is not the case at all. If you read any math textbook, generally the last problems in a section are the most difficult to understand and answer, unless you've mastered all the concepts in that section. Pure Computer Science is harder than pure math in many ways; 1) because unless you master all the concepts in a section, you won't get too far, and 2) computer science in general, but specifically this textbook is geared toward people who have already somewhat mastered mathematics, so all or most of the problems will be like the last problems of a section in a math textbook. "If it comes easy, then you're not doing it right."
- bennyg 13y ago
  > "If it comes easy, then you're not doing it right." I don't like that advice at all. Sure, not everything's easy, but the hard way is almost certainly not the right way. When I was learning to program (still am, as should all of us who are programmers), pointers came easy, arrays came easy, hash maps came easy. Almost every concept makes sense. I'm not some intellectual godsend either, so I know there are probably a countless amount of others who feel the same way. I think that the most likely option is that the "teacher," or at least method of teaching, is bad.
  - andrewl 13y ago
    It's also possible that the teacher, or the method, is simply a bad fit. I watched some of the SICP lecture, and they, and the book, are a bad fit for me, partly because I lack much of the math background. I'm sure there are other people for whom they're perfect.
- impendia 13y ago
  I think you definitely have a point -- but there's a case to be made for including some hard material in the text, and including some easy exercises. Indeed: Hard exercises have an important purpose. They are about problem solving. But so do easy exercises. They force you to make sure you understand the basics of what you're doing, and suss out bad habits before they become ingrained.
brudgers 13y ago
One of the unspoken premises of the book is that learning to program requires learning how to deal with new knowledge domains. SICP doesn't require mathematical sophistication - math is just another knowledge domain and not much different from the graphics domain in Chapter Two or the banking examples in Chapter three. In some ways mathematical knowledge is even easier to obtain since the same logic underpins it as the lambda calculus upon which scheme is built. That's not to say that some of the exercises don't rate 28 on the Knuth scale. But I don't think there are any 34's or higher...and it goes without saying that the Donald definitely throws in whatever math might be needed regardless of the reader's experience. And yet this doesn't make TAOCP inaccessible.
zallarak 13y ago
The goal of the book is not to "make you feel like you're awesome". I liked the more complicated exercises because it forced you to understand the associated concept well, attempt some problem-solving and get better at writing Scheme.
don_draper 13y ago
You can learn some of the concepts of SICP and better understand JavaScript with Fogus's book Functional Javascript: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028857.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028857.do I can't recommend this book enough. I'm sure some purists wouldn't put it in the same league as SICP, but I think you might like it.
omaranto 13y ago
I suspect that, for many people who love this book, the answer to why your complaint didn't bother them is simply that they don't share the complaint. I certainly don't remember thinking the exercises were of a different level than the main text, or off-topic, or confusingly worded. So it's not that having exercises "that might as well have been written in French" doesn't faze me, it's that I don't think that was the case.
zbinga 13y ago
Well, it might be the case that you were lacking some assumed prerequisites (don't forget that the book is aimed at MIT undergraduates, who will have some background in math and physics). But if you cannot relate an exercise to the subject matter you just studied, it might also be the case that you think you understand what you just read, but don't really do. It's easy to read math superficially, honestly believing that one has understood the point, when in fact the "mental image" the authors wished to impart on you has not been grasped. So you should not ignore the exercises, but work hard at them. They (well, some of them) are supposed to be hard. They are supposed to make you think, not just rehash what you just read. And after all that hard work, hopefully, something will click and you will be ready for the next section. And then you will feel awesome.
aufreak3 13y ago
The sure fire way to become a lousy programmer is to learn programming without some domain to apply it in. Given that MIT undergrads have a fair amount of math and physics backgrounds, the exercises aren't a bad fit at all (methinks). I always find it energizing when textbooks include problems with an "oh, by the way, this is an unsolved problem in the field" note. The good professors also appear to be carrying that tradition into the revised course ... and the most public attention goes to the switch from scheme to python.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 13y ago
You should probably have a copy of the Engineer-in-training handbook. This is a tremendously useful tome as it's written to provide the tools for solving problems, as opposed to theorizing about how problems ought to be solved. So while it's 'bad' from a pure math/physics standpoint in that it invites you to take things on faith rather than learning to derive them from first principles, it's great in terms of teaching you how to apply the fruits of these disciplines. http://www.amazon.com/Engineer---Training-Reference-Michael-Lindeburg/dp/0912045566/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375426934&sr=1-1&keywords=pe+engineers+handbook http://www.amazon.com/Engineer---Training-Reference-Michael-...

by tieTYT 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ThatGeoGuy 13y ago

If I recall correctly, the book does mention that it was designed with students at MIT in mind. I also recall that the students finish a couple calculus courses before taking the SICP course, so the math contained therein isn't exactly new material to them. For the most part I believe you're mostly complaining about chapter 1 though, maybe chapter 2 when they talk about painters and the exercise with the chessboard. Those are two that come to mind that tend to be excruciatingly long and unnecessarily difficult for beginners. I would advise you to go through the book again, and while this does come off as somewhat snooty, I would say that if you don't understand the math or physics behind some of the exercises, then you should spend time trying to figure out the algorithms for them. Most of the value of the book is actually through the exercises, as typically those are the spots where you'll eventually start to have those "aha!" moments when working with scheme. As a disclaimer, I should point out that I had quite a bit of programming experience in C++, Python, and other OOP languages before trying SICP. Luckily, I never struggled with the math, and learning Scheme came quite naturally. However, the common problems associated with thinking in Lisp do apply, and it may take several cracks at the book before you really understand the beauty or essence of what SICP tries to teach.

anologwintermut 13y ago

That is the difference between computer science as an academic subject and programing as a profession. The attitude was "we expect you to learn the language, that's easy. Now we are going to make you actually think about hard problems." The book is not "The Structure and Interpretation of Rails/Flask/Struts/Ysod CRUD Apps" for a reason.

mkmkmmmmm 13y ago
That would be a valid argument if the GP was a physicist, I guess. Why should GR be a prerequisite for CS?
- MoreConsiderate 13y ago
  Because GR is the basis for everything human. See Chimpanzee Politics, Schrödinger's cat, etc.
  - MoreConsiderate 13y ago
    Why was I downvoted? I believe I made an informed and appropriate point.
    - anigbrowl 13y ago
      I voted you back up. But the answer to your question is 'for the same reason you don't teach GR as a prerequisite to tying shoelaces.' Small children and shoelaces wouldn't be here without GR either, but it's just too abstract for most people. The problem for the poster above is that if you read SICP outside MIT or especially outside college, you're not surrounded by a bunch of science nerds who can be persuaded to explain general relativity in return for beer and a pizza. If you're not swimming in a sea of science, then problems involving the behavior of fish seem much trickier to solve. I've seen this problem iwth a few other MIT books, eg Horowitz and Hill.
      - antimagic 13y ago

nilkn 13y ago

The exercises are amazing, and they give you a chance not just to grapple with the language but to think about some fascinating problems and in some cases learn new material outside of the text proper. It's assumed that picking up the syntax of the language will be the easy part. Some of them are pretty hard, but they are always more or less direct applications of the ideas discussed in the previous section or two. Relativity is not really in any sense a direct application of addition. That said, the book is definitely written for those who have an undeniable aesthetic sense for beautiful problems.

btilly 13y ago

The point of the exercises is that the book is trying to demonstrate a WAY of thinking. No amount of passively watching words pass by while you nod sagely at how obvious it all is is going to make your brain actually try to think that way. My experience is that once I actually understood the section, the exercises were usually not that hard. However it was very easy to read a section and only think that I understood it.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
flatline 13y ago
I agree, and I love SICP, but it also assumes a general familiarity with undergraduate-level mathematics, up through calc 1 and linear algebra, as well as some basic number theory, that many people probably do not have and will immediately be intimidated by. Even though it does not rely heavily on these subjects, they are strewn throughout the work: the book was written at a time when the sole academic path in computing was as an engineering discipline, and the students all had a common background. The field of programming and, I would argue, computer science at large, is much more diverse now, and I think the text could have a broader reach with slightly different examples and exercises, and perhaps a bit more elaboration. Learning to model problems when you are both unfamiliar with the problem domain and the modeling tools is daunting, to say the least.
- tieTYT 13y ago
  This guy gets it :) A familiar problem domain would have made the book very enjoyable.

wonnage 13y ago

It would be good to read it with a different mindset. Learning something requires you to feel stupid for a bit, otherwise it's no great feat to learn it (and consequently feel awesome). The problems are all doable, given the expected background of its readers, just not easy or straightforward. If you ignore them you're missing out on 75% of the material - a lot the hard problems require you to apply something from the text that wasn't spelled out for you explicitly.

tieTYT 13y ago
I didn't ignore them, that's why I eventually gave up. I really enjoyed the book material and the exercises I could understand. But when I ran into an exercise that made me feel like I need to take a non-programming course to comprehend, it was really demotivating.

agumonkey 13y ago

SICP carry some baggage I believe. Abelson and Sussman are Electronics Engineers, fond of mathematical way of thinking and culture thus applying computing to think about these fields. I think that's one reason behind the creation of How to Design Programs (HtDP, by Felleisen) which deals with abstractions and recursive problem solving but without involving complex maths or physics. Later on, you might appreciate SICP problems with less resentment.

sev 13y ago

Take this with a grain of salt, but IMO the reason some people who try to learn programming end up with this type of mindset is because they have a wrong mindset to begin with: they believe learning to program should be relatively easy and have an obvious and relatively simple path to mastery. From my experience, this is not the case at all. If you read any math textbook, generally the last problems in a section are the most difficult to understand and answer, unless you've mastered all the concepts in that section. Pure Computer Science is harder than pure math in many ways; 1) because unless you master all the concepts in a section, you won't get too far, and 2) computer science in general, but specifically this textbook is geared toward people who have already somewhat mastered mathematics, so all or most of the problems will be like the last problems of a section in a math textbook. "If it comes easy, then you're not doing it right."

bennyg 13y ago
> "If it comes easy, then you're not doing it right." I don't like that advice at all. Sure, not everything's easy, but the hard way is almost certainly not the right way. When I was learning to program (still am, as should all of us who are programmers), pointers came easy, arrays came easy, hash maps came easy. Almost every concept makes sense. I'm not some intellectual godsend either, so I know there are probably a countless amount of others who feel the same way. I think that the most likely option is that the "teacher," or at least method of teaching, is bad.
- andrewl 13y ago
  It's also possible that the teacher, or the method, is simply a bad fit. I watched some of the SICP lecture, and they, and the book, are a bad fit for me, partly because I lack much of the math background. I'm sure there are other people for whom they're perfect.
impendia 13y ago
I think you definitely have a point -- but there's a case to be made for including some hard material in the text, and including some easy exercises. Indeed: Hard exercises have an important purpose. They are about problem solving. But so do easy exercises. They force you to make sure you understand the basics of what you're doing, and suss out bad habits before they become ingrained.

brudgers 13y ago

One of the unspoken premises of the book is that learning to program requires learning how to deal with new knowledge domains. SICP doesn't require mathematical sophistication - math is just another knowledge domain and not much different from the graphics domain in Chapter Two or the banking examples in Chapter three. In some ways mathematical knowledge is even easier to obtain since the same logic underpins it as the lambda calculus upon which scheme is built. That's not to say that some of the exercises don't rate 28 on the Knuth scale. But I don't think there are any 34's or higher...and it goes without saying that the Donald definitely throws in whatever math might be needed regardless of the reader's experience. And yet this doesn't make TAOCP inaccessible.

zallarak 13y ago

The goal of the book is not to "make you feel like you're awesome". I liked the more complicated exercises because it forced you to understand the associated concept well, attempt some problem-solving and get better at writing Scheme.

don_draper 13y ago

You can learn some of the concepts of SICP and better understand JavaScript with Fogus's book Functional Javascript: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028857.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028857.do I can't recommend this book enough. I'm sure some purists wouldn't put it in the same league as SICP, but I think you might like it.

omaranto 13y ago

I suspect that, for many people who love this book, the answer to why your complaint didn't bother them is simply that they don't share the complaint. I certainly don't remember thinking the exercises were of a different level than the main text, or off-topic, or confusingly worded. So it's not that having exercises "that might as well have been written in French" doesn't faze me, it's that I don't think that was the case.

zbinga 13y ago

Well, it might be the case that you were lacking some assumed prerequisites (don't forget that the book is aimed at MIT undergraduates, who will have some background in math and physics). But if you cannot relate an exercise to the subject matter you just studied, it might also be the case that you think you understand what you just read, but don't really do. It's easy to read math superficially, honestly believing that one has understood the point, when in fact the "mental image" the authors wished to impart on you has not been grasped. So you should not ignore the exercises, but work hard at them. They (well, some of them) are supposed to be hard. They are supposed to make you think, not just rehash what you just read. And after all that hard work, hopefully, something will click and you will be ready for the next section. And then you will feel awesome.

aufreak3 13y ago

The sure fire way to become a lousy programmer is to learn programming without some domain to apply it in. Given that MIT undergrads have a fair amount of math and physics backgrounds, the exercises aren't a bad fit at all (methinks). I always find it energizing when textbooks include problems with an "oh, by the way, this is an unsolved problem in the field" note. The good professors also appear to be carrying that tradition into the revised course ... and the most public attention goes to the switch from scheme to python.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

anigbrowl 13y ago

You should probably have a copy of the Engineer-in-training handbook. This is a tremendously useful tome as it's written to provide the tools for solving problems, as opposed to theorizing about how problems ought to be solved. So while it's 'bad' from a pure math/physics standpoint in that it invites you to take things on faith rather than learning to derive them from first principles, it's great in terms of teaching you how to apply the fruits of these disciplines. http://www.amazon.com/Engineer---Training-Reference-Michael-Lindeburg/dp/0912045566/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375426934&sr=1-1&keywords=pe+engineers+handbook http://www.amazon.com/Engineer---Training-Reference-Michael-...