The only computer science book worth reading twice? | Simon Dobson

When I read this title I instantly was transported back to the Scheme class I took at the University of Minnesota with Dr. John Carlis. I remember two things about that class very distinctly.

The first was Dr. Carlis asking the class to raise your hand if you knew one or more programming languages. Everyone raised their hand, it was a computer science class after all. He went on to two, three, four. Gradually people lowered their hands. He got to five and I had my hand up along with a handful of other students. I was beaming inside — proud to be at such a level. Then Dr. Carlis informed us that we with our hands up were going to have the hardest time in this class because Scheme was so different than the procedural languages we were familiar with.

The second thing I remember is Dr. Carlis holding the book fro the class up. It had a purple cover and was titled Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. There was a Lambda symbol on the cover. Dr. Carlis then shared that if he were stuck on a desert island and could only have one programming book for the rest of his life, it would be this one.

So it didn’t surprise me to see that this article was referencing that very same book. The link in the article is dated to the freely available version online. You can read the entire book on the web. And I’m delighted to see the book is licensed in Creative Commons license — the same organization that Weekly Thing Supporting Memberships is going to!