A Critique of Abelson and Sussman

"Unfortunately, the use of Scheme and SICP quickly dwindled again in the early 1990s. After working with SICP and Scheme for a while, instructors started to complain. Some said that SICP's content was too difficult for students outside of MIT. Others blamed Scheme directly, claiming that functional programming in Scheme was too different from programming in other languages. Even the functional programming community criticized the SICP approach; around this time, Wadler wrote his Critique of SICP and Scheme (Wadler, 1987).
Nowadays the critics even include professors at MIT, where the book and the course have become legends. Jackson and Chapin, who both have significant experience teaching SICP at MIT, recently wrote that:
 [f]rom an educational point of view, our experience suggests that undergraduate computer science courses should emphasize basic notions of modularity, specification, and data abstraction, and should not let these be displaced by more advanced topics, such as design patterns, object-oriented methods, concurrency, functional languages, and so on (Jackson & Chapin, 2000).

In short, SICP, Scheme, and functional programming don't prepare students properly for other programming courses and thus fail to meet a basic need."

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/jfp2004-fffk.pdf

The book never lives up to all the hype surrounding it. In fact, of the over 50 people I know who had the misfortune to study out of it, none liked it. I imagine only a few crazy souls who care about nothing but dry computer language theory would even consider this worth reading.

Recursion and information hiding via procedural/object code is nothing mysterious and is taught in all other CS classes, so the text adds nothing new. It merely retells the same old obvious programming techniques using a very poorly designed language (Scheme) and using completely uneducational examples. In short, this book is an overrated waste of time. If you are familiar with structured programming in a language like C++, you won't get anything new out of this. In fact, any topic presented here is better learned elsewhere, since the text is just one of those poorly written books that try to be encyclopedic at the expense of being interesting and thorough.