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https://github.com/ivanjovanovic/sicp

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs study notes with exercise solutions
https://github.com/ivanjovanovic/sicp

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Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs study notes with exercise solutions

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# A Year of SICP



On 1st of August 2011. I started a project which was to raise my

programming skills to a new level of understanding the magic of computer

programming. Somehow it turned out that it took me exactly one year to

finish. On 31st of July 2012. I have finished the section 5.5 of the book.

By finishing, I mean to do almost all exercises in the book and to

try to understand every concept presented in the book. As I figured out

towards the end, the goal of the book in fact is to destroy all the

magic that incompetent eye could see in the programming job. Maybe

better said, to lead the reader into the skills needed to bridle the

core concepts of the domain and to use them as magician would do to

produce magical things.



SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) is a masterpiece of

Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman on basics of computer science and software engineering.



### Goal



My goal is to



  * Read the [SICP book](http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html)

  * Watch the [MIT 6.001 course](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-spring-2005/) videos

  * Do exercises from the book

  * Keep track of my progress in written form so other can eventually

    have benefit from this.



### Process



At start, I used [Heist](https://github.com/jcoglan/heist) Scheme interpreter

written in Ruby.



After I passed more then a third of examples I have installed

[CHICKEN](http://call-cc.org/) Scheme compiler and interpreter to run

examples. It is better in supporting standards, comes with additional

libraries that can be installed, it is MUCH faster and gives much better

error messages with proper backtraces.



Also I used [Racket](http://racket-lang.org/) for deeper debugging and

analysis of the problems where needed. After I got some parenthesis

parsing powers I did not need it that much.



Usually I go this way through the material:

  1. Watch the video lecture, or the part of it while taking notes

  2. Get through notes and clarify concepts and ideas explained mostly

     trying to reflect on them myself without external help

  3. Go through book and do exercises one by one. I save exercises in

     separate files where I add notes and reflections on them.



Of course, I don't tend to do this in one take, I do it continuously

when I have free time but trying to dedicate as much time as I can to

this so I don't lose the track of where I stopped.



### Used references



* [R5RS Standard specification](http://schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/r5rs.pdf)

* [Scheme at Glance](http://www.troubleshooters.com/codecorn/scheme_guile/hello.htm)

* [Schemers.org](http://schemers.org/)



## Other SICP solutions online

* http://eli.thegreenplace.net/category/programming/lisp/sicp/

* https://wqzhang.wordpress.com/sicp-solutions/

* http://community.schemewiki.org/?SICP-Solutions

* https://github.com/Pluies/SICP