Why is the SICP so good?

After a month or so of going through the SICP, playing with Scheme, and completing all the exercises (most in multiple ways; I want my programs to be short, simple, and pretty), I feel like I'm finally a true LISPer. And I view computer science entirely differently than I did back in CS 101 (dropped out of that due to boredom); if I may make the comparison, I'm Buddha after he starved and wasted away, burning away his physical impurities in the metaphysical sense. The SICP has made me a better person outside of my own CS work, too; I've actually felt inspired to help out members of my off-line community to learn CS, and I've donated ten copies of the Text to the local school district. I hear most public schools have poor libraries. I hope it reaches and transforms others in the way it has me.

>>8
I'm sure you had a great intro to Computer Science, but you have to realize that most schools don't go through both functional and imperative programming, data abstraction, streams, and (heck) virtual machines all in the first semester.

At my shitty school, for example, we went through half a semester of Boolean logic, even Karnaugh maps, because they seem to think that bitdiddling is actually that important to the understanding computing, and then followed with a Python tutorial. Fin.