SICK sucks

This book is filled with pompous statements and philosophical discussions. Who cares? No one. Instead of teaching really useful things, such as algorithms, or tecnhiques, the text spends huge amounts of space on pointless philosophical discussions. For example, when assignments are introduced...(e.g. x = x + 1), the authors take up a boring discussion about the conceptual difficulties and implications this introduces into the language. Again, who cares? Millions of lines of code are written in C every year and everything works just fine. You can tell from the book's preface that the aim isn't to teach you programming, but instead to philosophise about conceptual issues...whatever that means. In other words, this text belongs more in a philosophy course than in a computer science course. There's more talk here, and less real action. It supposedly teaches you how to think about programming, but that is already accomplished by C courses, which teach objects and functions.

Aside from that, it does a decent job of introducing Scheme. But here again, that language is strongly tied to the book's philosophy. It is nearly impossible to write anything useful in the language, as it's designed to demonstrate some finer points of reasoning about computer science, and is not designed as a practical programming language.

If you are looking to learn practical skills, don't get this book, it'll only waste your time. If you are interested in "philosophy of programming" mumbo jumbo, you might like this book. Although, I should warn you, the text pretends to teach both things, but does neither well.

This is pure "programming for its own sake" type of text. If you like that, fine, but if you want to program for the sake of accomplishing something useful, there are only a handful of sections in this book that discuss anything of relevance and you'll just waste your money.

The ability to visualize the consequences of the actions under consideration is crucial to becoming an expert programmer, just as it is in any synthetic, creative activity. In becoming an expert photographer, for example, one must learn how to look at a scene and know how dark each region will appear on a print for each possible choice of exposure and development conditions. Only then can one reason backward, planning framing, lighting, exposure, and development to obtain the desired effects. So it is with programming, where we are planning the course of action to be taken by a process and where we control the process by means of a program. To become experts, we must learn to visualize the processes generated by various types of procedures. Only after we have developed such a skill can we learn to reliably construct programs that exhibit the desired behavior.