Rating: 
Summary: It's so obvious
Review: If you design computer systems, you will love this book. If you whack away until your program does what you want, you will think it's stupid.There are sheep, and there are goats. The goats think they are pretty much the same as the sheep. They are not.
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Summary: don't read unless you like to be bored
Review: This book is used as a filter in our computer science department. It subjects students to material so boring, and presented so poorly, that only those who can stand through it all ever stay on for more computer science classes. Complete waste of your time....it describes (in a confusing manner) concepts which can be better learned elsewhere. The authors apparently believe that quantity is better than quality, and try to cram a lot of material without explaining any of it in detail.
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Summary: The Book that made me fall in love with Programming
Review: I first encountered this book while taking the intro course on computer programming at the University of Chicago. I probably devoted 20 hours a week for 10 weeks to the book, to the programming exercises, and to try to understand Scheme. I had very little programming experience, and was studying mathematics for the most part. The book simply opened a whole new world for me where programming was concerned, interesting me in the theoretical underpinnings of programming. Three years after first reading it, I'm going back over it again, trying to glean all that I missed the first hurried time around. Is it a great book? Yes. But is it right for everyone? No. I would liken it to something like Tolstoy's War and Peace: at a certain point in your life, you can read it and it becomes a beautiful epic. However, if you're too young or not mature enough, it will just be a long drag about a War that happened a long time ago. For some people, this will just leap right off as a great book, and lead them to places in programming that they didn't know existed. For others, it may take a long time and a lot of work to get much out of it. However, this does not detract or subtract from its greatness: there is something in this book for almost everyone if they but spend the time and search for it; that itself is the essense of this book's greatness.
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Summary: A wonderful Book! please do take the time to read it
Review: i am a UCberkeley Electrical Engineering and Comp sci major... a person that would much rather be out "swing" dancing or hiking...however this book was so intriguing that i needed to dedicate my weekends learning philosphy of computer science(versus computer programming)... I loved it..the time passed by... the exercises were fun and interesting...the reading was hard, but its a rewarding path! This book definitely helps you condition your ability to define problems and solve them :-)
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Summary: <yawn>...
Review: I was quite disappointed with this book. It starts out ok, but after the second half of section 2, the book gets to be incredibly thick and boring. I've never felt so disinterested about anything in computer science, and it's not the subjects, mind you (compilers and logic programming can be fun), but it's the dry, pedantic style, obviously written for the sake and glory of the authors and not for the sole purpose of teaching someone.
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Summary: Horrible..don't buy this book!
Review: I don't know what these few people see in this book. It's boring, it's cryptic and the material is pointless. Perhaps they had good teachers or are deluding themselves into thinking this book must be good since it's from MIT. For 99.9% of people who read it (and I've talked with a lot of people about this book) it was a very unpleasant experience. The lucky few got good teacher, but even those saw clearly that it was the teacher's merit and that the book is terrible. Get this only if you want to waste your time or money.
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Summary: Lots of useful material here
Review: The reviews here that complain that there isn't anything to learn in SICP, or that there aren't any ideas, or that there's nothing but philosophizing and handwaving, are bizarre. SICP is full of detailed, complete examples of parsers, interpreters, compilers, and digital simulators. It shows how to build your own object-oriented programming system from scratch. It shows how to construct a extensible database query language with a backtracking search to find the answers to complex queries. It shows how to build an optimizing compiler. Sure, none of this is useful---if your goal in life is to grind out CGI scripts. If that's who you are, this book definitely isn't for you. But the folks who don't recognize the SICP examples as real, practical programming projects are living in a funny little fantasy world. They might use the optimizing compiler every day, but it doesn't occur to them that someone actually had to write that optimizing compiler. Nope, code generation and peephole optimization techniques are not applicable to the real world because `nobody' writes compilers. Every one of these big, complex programs is explained in detail, with *complete* code examples. You can type them all in and run them. These are big projects, and there's a lot of code, so you shouldn't expect to understand any of the examples on the first glance; you have to study it closely to understand how the parts interact. If you're looking for silly little toy examples that fit on one page, this definitely isn't the book that you want. I get the feeling that a lot of the one-star folks are after little toy examples. Maybe they want a CGI hit counter or something. I don't know how well this book works as an introductory book; I had already been programming for about fifteen years when I first read SICP. So perhaps the criticisms that it isn't properly aimed at beginners are on target. But the other criticisms, that say that ``There is absolutely nothing interesting here. Just a couple of bored MIT professors trying to teach extremely boring and pointless concepts'' really miss the mark. Sure, building an object-oriented programming system is a boring and pointless concept---if you happen to be a ditchdigger. But what if you want to be the person who constructs OO programming systems? Or what if you want to extend the OO system you usually use with new features? What if you *don't* want to open up a can of precooked beans and heat them up on the stove? There are two kinds of reviews on this page. One kind is from people who say that the book is pointless and there's nothing useful. The other kind is from people who say that the book is full of useful, concrete examples. Maybe the people who found the book useful were suckered. But how can you trick someone into thinking that something pointless and empty is actually useful? That's a hard trick to play! How could there be so many people wakling around, doing their programming jobs, *thinking* that they're using techniques and strategies that they learned from SICP, when actually there was nothing there at all? Where did those techniques come from, then? On the other hand, another explanation is that maybe those people who think that the book is pointless and empty just missed the point. That seems more likely, doesn't it? People miss the point of things all the time. They read a little to quickly, or a little too carelessly, and the explanation or relevance goes over their heads. That happens every day. When the reviewer says that `nothing in the book is applicable', that could be a problem with the book, or it could be a problem with the reviewer. My vote is for problems with the reviewer.
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Summary: bad book!
Review: Unless you are required to have this text for the course (and why else would you buy this terrible book?) don't get the text. If you have any doubts about computer science, this book will make you hate it. It tries to mold budding computer scientists by gathering the driest, most boring subjects into one monster collection. You'll probably fall asleep before finishing the first few pages.
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Summary: Half cooked...poor explanations
Review: I'm extremely interested in theoretical computer scinece, but I found out that this book presented the subject very poorly...emphasizing the wrong concepts and overall not giving a coherent and lucid discussion. Waste of money, in short.
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Summary: if looking for ideas, look elsewhere
Review: I would say only the idea of abstraction is "beatiful" but the rest of the book is drivel. It tries to present profound ideas, but fails miserably for lack of lively content or perhaps the incompetence of the authors as teachers. Although I haven't looked, I'm sure there are plenty of better books on the art of programming. This one is just a waste of time no matter what your interests are.
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