SICP

Say, someone who has no prior experience with programming, and is at a rather 'young' age (Teen still) wants to get ahead of the game, and start up now, rather than later. Would one go about this by reading SICP? I've seen it linked so many times, I've only got to think it's a start.

>>64
Yes, yes, I more or less understand what happens there, but it's not at all obvious why the evaluation of the resulting unforced tree of (+)'s is not TCO'd. I mean, it obviously could be optimized in this particular case, right?

More generally, my point was that when you use any external code in a nontrivial way, you can't be sure that it wouldn't blow your stack. The type system doesn't capture the notion of being eligible for TCO through and through.