That's an interesting comparison. K&R did nothing for me, I honestly did not understand C until I read Harbison & Steele.
K&R blew my mind when I was a teenager, but years flipping through it again it does nothing for me. I think the experience somebody will have with K&R depends greatly on their previous experiences.
It's certainly not "mind-blowing", and is not intended to be, but it is a brilliant example of how a technical book on a specific programming language should be written.
Anyone else feel like this book is really overrated? I've enjoyed the classical mechanics book by the same authors a lot more since it goes over a particularly good application where functional ideas shine
I totally respect and even admire dissenting opinions, but, on the contrary, this book is magic for me. For me, it connects programming to larger and vital human endeavor. K&R does that for me too, so maybe it's a me thing.
K&R still holds a place for me as one of my favorite programming books. It may not hold up today, especially not for new readers, but at a time when the alternatives were Pascal, Fortran, Basic and Assembly, the C Programming Language was an intoxicating blend of power and elegance. In addition to serving as an introduction to C, K&R was opinionated in a way that I hadn't seen from other programming books to that point, with as much emphasis on style as how to get things done. It's the Strunk and White of programming (or was at the time).
The foreword of this book must be the only one I have ever read where I disagree with almost every statement it makes. This doesn't encourage you to carry on, but I have (first couple of chapters), and find the whole structure and direction of the thing inimical to me.
It seems to me that this is somewhat like the "dragon book" - people were exposed to it before they had read other better books.
I totally respect and even admire dissenting opinions, but, on the contrary, this book is magic for me. For me, it connects programming to larger and vital human endeavor. K&R does that for me too, so maybe it's a me thing.
> it connects programming to larger and vital human endeavor What endeavour exactly?
Good question -- I appreciate it. The application of human ingenuity to solving problems maybe (engineering in the widest sense). But there's something even more abstract, I think... Something more like _thinking_ most generally. It's almost like reading philosophy in the way it carefully and openly walks through a progression of thoughts...
> You are probably reading it in an Info hypertext browser, such as the Info mode of Emacs. You might alternatively be reading it TEX-formatted on your screen or printer, though that would be silly.
The original course videos are on youtube too! I found them a bit easier to watch than reading the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J_xL4IGhJA&list=PLE18841CAB...
I took a one-week SICP course with 5 or 6 other professional programmers last year. It was amazing. I wrote about my personal motivation for doing so here: https://amontalenti.com/2018/08/26/sicp-expanding As for an update: SICP was as good as I expected and definitely makes a professional programmer regain some love for the art and magic of computer science. (However, the book is a hard read without a guide. But it'…
Does it make sense to use Clojure while reading the book?
I started with Clojure but ultimately ended up using scheme. Clojure has built in solutions to some of the things that you’re asked in exercises which I think takes away from the experience.
K&R blew my mind when I was a teenager, but years flipping through it again it does nothing for me. I think the experience somebody will have with K&R depends greatly on their previous experiences.
It's certainly not "mind-blowing", and is not intended to be, but it is a brilliant example of how a technical book on a specific programming language should be written.
The point some of us are trying to make here is that K&R works for some learning styles but not others. It's definitely not universal.
You probably know this, but for others reading along, Racket has a #lang sicp language to fully support using Racket to follow along. https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/index.html
Alternatively, install MIT Scheme (*nix/macOS): https://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/
If MIT Scheme runs on your computer, great. IIRC, SICP support was added to DrRacket with the idea that it would be more accessible to new students (runs on more computers, student-oriented IDE that's less-intimidating than something Emacs-ish).
I took a one-week SICP course with 5 or 6 other professional programmers last year. It was amazing. I wrote about my personal motivation for doing so here: https://amontalenti.com/2018/08/26/sicp-expanding As for an update: SICP was as good as I expected and definitely makes a professional programmer regain some love for the art and magic of computer science. (However, the book is a hard read without a guide. But it'…
Does it make sense to use Clojure while reading the book?
I think it makes sense to use whatever language you want, and the ideas in the book don't only apply to Scheme.
I've been working through the book in Javascript - https://github.com/ahuth/sicp/. Maybe I'm losing something by doing it in JS instead of Scheme, but I'm still learning a lot and having a ton of fun.