This is incredibly beautiful. I wish all technical writing online could be so well presented - I'm tired of trying to read two-column journal-formatted PDFs on my phone.
Beautiful Online SICP
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Re: Beautiful Online SICP
#22This is incredibly beautiful. I wish all technical writing online could be so well presented - I'm tired of trying to read two-column journal-formatted PDFs on my phone.
There is an excellent 'pocket' format for compact E-readers in the parent's Github repo as well, which should be nice for smaller screen sizes.
Re: Beautiful Online SICP
#23SICP is the one text I wish I'd known about when studying computer science at uni. When I finally discovered and read it, it was a truly eye-opening experience and revolutionised the way I thought about tackling problems and designing software. It may have been around for a while, but the ideas presented still hold water today. As others have mentioned, the linked version has some definite improvements over the web v…
>it was a truly eye-opening experience and revolutionised the way I thought about tackling problems and designing software.
Really curious. Can you share a bit more details about this. Like specific instances of how it changed your thinking..
Re: Beautiful Online SICP
#24SICP is the one text I wish I'd known about when studying computer science at uni. When I finally discovered and read it, it was a truly eye-opening experience and revolutionised the way I thought about tackling problems and designing software. It may have been around for a while, but the ideas presented still hold water today. As others have mentioned, the linked version has some definite improvements over the web v…
>it was a truly eye-opening experience and revolutionised the way I thought about tackling problems and designing software. Really curious. Can you share a bit more details about this. Like specific instances of how it changed your thinking..
For example, I previously tended to use a bottom-up approach to development. However, SICP showed me the benefits of what it calls "wishful thinking" with a more top-down approach.
It also helped me finally 'get' functional programming. Even in situations where other programming paradigms make more sense, I'll still opt for a functional style a lot of the time and avoid state.
I'm also a lot more confident with higher-order functions and closures after SICP help me understand them better. Seeing how cons pairs can be implemented as functions was simply mind-blowing. I think being able to use some of these techniques have improved the way I code.
There are a lot of other topics, such as the meta-circular evaluator, that I haven't had the opportunity to put into practice, but are nonetheless absolutely fascinating.
Re: Beautiful Online SICP
#25is there a beautiful epub version?
Re: Beautiful Online SICP
#26is there a beautiful epub version?
found it.
Re: Beautiful Online SICP
#27Unpopular opinion but having read this book, I think it's a "good" text that is a bit blown out of proportion in terms of how good it is. I'm curious for people that endorse to such a magnanimous degree what other literature they've read and what aspects of SICP in particular they find so superior.
Re: Beautiful Online SICP
#28Unpopular opinion but having read this book, I think it's a "good" text that is a bit blown out of proportion in terms of how good it is. I'm curious for people that endorse to such a magnanimous degree what other literature they've read and what aspects of SICP in particular they find so superior.
First of all, it's an introductory text that provides a practical whirlwind tour of introductory computer science. Second starts from a straightforward place (when the first edition was written it was quite reasonable to assume that a student arriving at university, even MIT, might never have programmed a computer before) and after one lecture on the scheme language, dives in to practical details. Third, unlike, say, your average introductory programming class it doesn't get hung up on syntax; unlike an average introductory algorithm class the algorithm examples are typically on stuff a student would already know (numerical methods, etc) rather than super-abstract "consider a graph..." Finally it's an engineering text: if you do the problems you end up writing an interpreter for the thing that seemed so amazing on the first day and you discover you know how all the bits fit together.
Re: Beautiful Online SICP
#29awesome. I'd also do Cormen & Leiserson's book as well as Aho's dragon book if I had the copyrights :). True epics in CS. Maybe even add Don Knuth's multi-volumes.
Re: Beautiful Online SICP
#30perhaps only tangentially related but recently I began noting down beautiful typefaces I come across, the two used here are Inconsolata LGC and Linux Libertine O. do you guys have favorites?
Inconsolata has been my favorite monospace font for working in terminals and editors for a couple years now. It's pretty subtly-serifed for a monospace, punctuation doesn't seem to distract me like it can in other fonts, and I find it easy to distinguish close characters like "1" "l" "I".