Rating: 
Summary: WARNING: This book will cause you severe pain
Review: I'm all for learning about good programming style, and I'm sure plenty of things in this book could be applied to some good purpose (with a stretch of imagination) but there's just no excuse for a book to be written so poorly. It is boring, it is confusing, and you won't learn much by reading it. I only figured out the concepts being presented after I went and listened in lecture at my university. In other words, don't get this book if you hope to learn on your own. You won't.
Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding
Review: The negative reviewers entirely missed the point of this book. The issues are not c++ versus scheme, nor the gap between the book's examples and real-world programs, nor that recursion is less intuitive than looping.The real point is to teach some very core foundations of computer science that show up everywhere. For example, supposedly revolutionary XML looks a heck of a lot like a nested scheme list, first described in 1960. And processing an active server page (or Java server page) is very much like the textbook's specialized language evaluator. Finally, c++ polymorphism through vtables and part of Microsoft's COM mechanics are the exact same thing as the book's data-directed programming section. This is very deep material for a programming newbie to learn outside a course, but for an experienced nerd who's looking for a systematic framework, it's absolutely terrific. I had done lots of lisp and compiler work before reading the book, so many of the concepts were not new. But it's with this framework in mind that I learn new technologies, and this approach greatly speeds up how long it takes to understand each week's "new" hot product/language/tool/mindset. Put another way: why do so many popular computer books take 1000 pages to describe a few trivial concepts?
Rating:
Summary: not good
Review: People told me this book was B.S. , so I went throught the entire course without reading it and going to lecture, which worked splendidly. I got this book at another store at the very end, just as a curiousity, and promptly returned it when I saw just how bad it is. Confusing, pointless, dumb. This isn't about the value of fundamental knowledge of computer science anymore, the book is outright poor as a teacher. I'm sure there are other books on philosophy of computer science which will teach you a lot more. This one is just a waste of money.
Rating:
Summary: Great book for theory and ideas - not a 'C' book
Review: This book is for people who like their theory as much as they like practical books. It will *not* make you immediately able to command great money as a programmer (as opposed to spending time becoming a Microsoft or Sun certified engineer). What it will do is make you think about the structure of your programs in ways that 'C' & 'C++' community have great difficulty in doing because of the inherent complexity of their environment. Get if from the library - if you like it buy it as a reference - if you don't you won't have wasted your money!
Rating:
Summary: What's so good about it?
Review: I don't understand what others see in this book. I realize that it is *supposed* to be about foundations of good programming style, and not about any language in particular, but being language specific is exactly what it does. Many things it teaches can only be done in Scheme. Also, I think the presentation of material is very poor, whatever the purpose. For example, they spend a disproportionate amount of time on simple concepts, and rush through complicated information, such as the implementation of a logic programming language. This book is thoroughly confusing, and chances are you won't learn anything new. Anyone who has read the book carefully will notice its poor style.
Rating:
Summary: disappointing
Review: I was not pleased with this book. I listened to the hype and bought it in hopes of learning something insighful about good programming style and some interesting theory. Instead, I got a very boring book. Half of it seems to be Scheme specific, which completely negates its purpose of being "language independent". The other half is tryly theoretical, but it's either completely irrelevant, or it is self evident, such as abstraction. Anyone who has done some programming knows that splitting programs into procedures, and data into abstract objects is a good thing. Do we really need to read a whole chapter or more to relearn this? Reading this text is futile. Its cause is good, but it falls far short of its overstated goals.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent introduction to programming
Review: The negative reviews that are showing up really distress me--these seem to be missing the point of the book entirely. This book is not about Scheme, nor LISP, nor anything particular to the language and environment. It teaches you the fundamentals of programming, both in your code, and what happens to your code during and after compilation. The concepts that you learn from this can be applied to any language out there. This book covers pretty much everything a beginning programmer needs to know, and in a clear manner. While the material does move rapidly, and becomes dry in parts, that is unfortunately the nature of the beast--exactly how exciting can you make learning efficient compilation techniques? :-)
Rating:
Summary: did not likes it
Review: Thiese book seems contradictory. It tries to teach proper programming, but at the same time, it requires me using a poorly designed development system, withoet a debugger, or at least without any helpful statements as to where exactly in the program an error ocured. They couldnt do even this little. But, specific interpreters aside, the presentation of material is bad too. It is either very boring, or if it is somewhat interesting, it is only given 2 pages, such as with huffman trees. Some topics are outright useles, like streams, or self evident, such as local state. In short, this is a waste of time.
Rating:
Summary: horrible
Review: I must say, it takes great talent to take relatively simple and curious ideas, and present them in a very boring and convoluted way. That's right, this book will make you feel pain at every paragraph. You won't learn anything either. If you are interested in theoretical side of computers, there are plenty of better books. Don't waste your time and money on this one.
Rating:
Summary: not too bad, but completely useless
Review: This book is readable. I can't say it's fun or easy to understand, but a *few* concepts might seem interesting. However, the large majority of things introduced can't be applied. Streams, for example, are introduced to alleviate the bottlenecks created by Scheme in conjunction with poor code planning earlier in the book. They are completely irrelevant to languages like C/C++. The same with other things here. Mildly curious but nothing useful and certainly no profound theories, as some would have you believe.
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