Structure And Interpretation Of Computer Programs

Also referred as SICP, it’s a well known MIT book published in the late 80’s and used in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering courses. Written by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman and Julie Sussman. It’s the definitive functional programming book.

It’s available for free in many formats such as HTML and PDF. This book insipred me to create this blog. It’s just wonderful, it’s the great grimoire of computer wizardry. But not only that, the MIT OpenCourseWare has the whole video lectures from 1986 taught by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman themselves, and with no cost.

These twenty video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman are a complete presentation of the course, given in July 1986 for Hewlett-Packard employees, and professionally produced by Hewlett-Packard Television. These videos are also available here under a Creative Commons license compatible with commercial use.

Note: These lectures follow the first edition (1985) of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Many of the programs discussed were rewritten for the second edition (1996) of the book, and new material was added. These video lectures will still be useful for students using the second edition, since the overall themes of the course and order of presentation are unchanged.

These videos are courtesy of Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, and are used with permission.

The book uses the language Scheme which is a Lisp dialect, one of the oldest languages (1959) to teach pure functional concepts from the very basics to the more complex cases. It’s like learning to program again from a pure functional perspective.

This course introduces students to the principles of computation. Upon completion of 6.001, students should be able to explain and apply the basic methods from programming languages to analyze computational systems, and to generate computational solutions to abstract problems. Substantial weekly programming assignments are an integral part of the course. This course is worth 4 Engineering Design Points.

And here’s the first lecture, just in case:

Course Citation and License

Eric Grimson, Peter Szolovits, and Trevor Darrell. 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Spring 2005. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.