Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, with Julie Sussman, grew out of MIT's introductory programming course and was first published in 1985. Often called SICP, the book teaches computer science through Scheme, a dialect of Lisp, rather than a conventional language like C or Java, and it treats programming as a medium for expressing ideas about process and knowledge. Its central framework is the abstraction of processes: building procedures, then combining them into higher-level structures, and reasoning about them with substitution models and environment diagrams. The book moves through five chapters. Chapter one covers building abstractions with procedures, introducing recursion, higher-order functions, and the difference between iterative and recursive processes. Chapter two builds abstractions with data, exploring pairs, lists, symbolic manipulation, and data-directed programming. Chapter three addresses modularity, objects, and state, including assignment, local state, streams, and concurrency. Chapter four is about metalinguistic abstraction: readers implement a Scheme evaluator, including a lazy variant, to see how language semantics can be represented as data. Chapter five examines computing with register machines, covering assembly-level design, garbage collection, and a compiler that translates Scheme into machine instructions. Distinctive set pieces include the sum of squares, the change-counting problem, the picture language for line drawings, the digital circuit simulator, and the query system for logic programming. The book emphasizes functional programming, recursion, and the idea that programs are recursive descriptions of processes. Its exercises are famously demanding. Though MIT eventually shifted away from Scheme in its introductory course, SICP remains widely read and is frequently cited as one of the most influential computer science texts ever written.