SICP

I read this book in 10 sittings. In all honesty, it took me that long to understand material that came in chapter 3 and later. And I'm no novice. I've been programming for 10 years now, having done everything from compilers to database systems. I have never seen a worse book in my life. It is as if the authors are not trying to teach anything but are merely writing for glory and self gratification. I got the book in February based on some good comments on this page, and now I see that those people either had learning support in school, or they simply skimmed it and now have an illusion of having learned something profound. I certainly don't think the ideas here are of any practical value, and if they are (very few in this book) they have been known to all for a long time now. The first two chapters are a waste of space, and the rest are a waste of everyone's time. It is obvious this book was written to fill some dubious requirement at MIT and now other copycat colleges use it as well. I just feel sorry for the students who have to go through it all. At least I was able to return the book at will, having learned absolutely nothing.

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Exercise 5.51.  Develop a rudimentary implementation of Scheme in C (or some other low-level language of your choice) by translating the explicit-control evaluator of section 5.4 into C. In order to run this code you will need to also provide appropriate storage-allocation routines and other run-time support.

Exercise 5.52.  As a counterpoint to exercise 5.51, modify the compiler so that it compiles Scheme procedures into sequences of C instructions. Compile the metacircular evaluator of section 4.1 to produce a Scheme interpreter written in C.