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Concept
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Summary
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) is a computer science textbook by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman. It is known as the "Wizard Book" in hacker culture. It teaches fundamental principles of computer programming, including recursion, abstraction, modularity, and programming language design and implementation.
MIT Press published the first edition in 1984, and the second edition in 1996. It was formerly used as the textbook for MIT's introductory course in computer science. SICP focuses on discovering general patterns for solving specific problems, and building software systems that make use of those patterns.
MIT Press published the JavaScript edition in 2022.
The book describes computer science concepts using Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. It also uses a virtual register machine and assembler to implement Lisp interpreters and compilers.
Topics in the books are:
The Elements of Programming
Procedures and the Processes They Generate
Formulating Abstractions with Higher-Order Procedures
Introduction to Data Abstraction
Hierarchical Data and the Closure Property
Symbolic Data
Multiple Representations for Abstract Data
Systems with Generic Operations
Assignment and Local State
The Environment Model of Evaluation
Modeling with Mutable Data
Concurrency: Time Is of the Essence
Streams
The Metacircular Evaluator
Variations on a Scheme – Lazy Evaluation
Variations on a Scheme – Nondeterministic Computing
Logic Programming
Designing Register Machines
A Register-Machine Simulator
Storage Allocation and Garbage Collection
The Explicit-Control Evaluator
Compilation
Several fictional characters appear in the book:
Alyssa P. Hacker, a Lisp hacker
Ben Bitdiddle
Cy D. Fect, a "reformed C programmer"
Eva Lu Ator
Lem E. Tweakit
Louis Reasoner, a loose reasoner
The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
The book was used as the textbook for MIT's former introductory programming course, 6.
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