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Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]

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Re: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]

#111
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TeX isn't so bad when you use a typeface other than the eyeball-scarring, madness-inducing Computer Modern.

Computer Modern looks decent in print, which it was designed for (pick up any book by Knuth, not a modern book typeset with LaTeX). It looks less good on screen, partly because on-screen output barely existed at the time it was designed, and partly because what you've seen is probably not really Computer Modern: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/361722/48

A similar story happened to Courier, which, afaik, was digitized from the designs meant for printing and thus accounting for print ink gain. On its own the the font's forms look too thin too.

Re: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]

#112
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that is a fantastic story! Kudos for completing your PhD! Would you mind expanding a bit more about your PhD? Which school did you go to? Did you find that your age made it more difficult to get in/stay in once accepted? How did you handle family commitments (if you had them)? Reason I ask is because I've been considering going back to school to get a PhD. Again, that is quite an achievement, so congrats!

Thank you much. Sorry for the wall of text, but you got me going! I had been living and working in California, and found myself at the crest of the dot-com wave of the late 90's and early '00s. But post-SICP, I _had_ to dig deeper. I didn't feel prepared for the schools I wanted to apply to: Berkeley & Stanford. I am totally self-taught, and not having taken an exam in any CS subjects, the subject GRE was a huge ment…

Such a detailed answer. Thank you. Unlike you, I registered for an MRes. (Masters in Research) degree at a UK but found that due to lack of taught courses I couldn’t plug the holes in my mathematical foundations. For the very few courses that were taught, quality of teaching was also an issue which presumably wouldn’t be the case at a university like Cambridge. Even though I finished with honours, I am still left with the nagging feeling that I didn’t get what I wanted out of my effort.

Re: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]

#113

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'…

If working alone, I suggest going off the deep end and implementing the metasyntactic evaluator in any language one likes. You need to figure out how to implement lexing and parsing if this is not familiar to you, but it's not that hard.

Re: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]

#114
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you much. Sorry for the wall of text, but you got me going! I had been living and working in California, and found myself at the crest of the dot-com wave of the late 90's and early '00s. But post-SICP, I _had_ to dig deeper. I didn't feel prepared for the schools I wanted to apply to: Berkeley & Stanford. I am totally self-taught, and not having taken an exam in any CS subjects, the subject GRE was a huge ment…

Such a detailed answer. Thank you. Unlike you, I registered for an MRes. (Masters in Research) degree at a UK but found that due to lack of taught courses I couldn’t plug the holes in my mathematical foundations. For the very few courses that were taught, quality of teaching was also an issue which presumably wouldn’t be the case at a university like Cambridge. Even though I finished with honours, I am still left wit…

Quality of teaching is a problem everywhere. Universities reward researchers, not teachers. There are very few who dedicate themselves to quality teaching. Also there didn't seem to be any courses at Cambridge geared towards grad studies (or remedial education, which is what I wanted, lol). The undergrad courses were themselves much tougher compared to their US counterparts and very math-oriented.

I recall sitting through a denotational semantics course and the students (all of 18 years old) were asking apparently relevant questions, and the prof (Glynn Wynskel) would say, 'that's a good question'. And I'm sitting at the back of the class awed at this spectacle! I'm wondering what was in this kid's background that prepared him better than me for this course. I have written a compiler, dammit, and I have 20 years of experience. The odds are that I should have heard something in those 20 years that left me marginally better prepared. But no. Here I am, understanding neither the question nor the answer!

It is only in my third year that it clicked. It was just a resistance to formal math, a resistance I had no idea I had. Once I got over it, and I was able to treat math notation as a compact way of writing it out, I started having a good time.

I have a suspicion that quality teaching alone would not have solved your nagging feeling. You need soak time. I am convinced that the 1-year masters programs in the UK (and increasingly so in the US) are a scam. They are only good for the uni to make money, but the students are shafted.

Re: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]

#115

Pictures in the PDF are garbled. The Version built from https://github.com/sarabander/sicp-pdf is much better.

The PDF in this post is built from https://github.com/sarabander/sicp-pdf. See https://opendocs.github.io/sicp/ for more details. If you have a direct link to a better rendering of this book, could you please share it? I would like to see which pages are rendered better in it.

Re: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]

#116
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that is a fantastic story! Kudos for completing your PhD! Would you mind expanding a bit more about your PhD? Which school did you go to? Did you find that your age made it more difficult to get in/stay in once accepted? How did you handle family commitments (if you had them)? Reason I ask is because I've been considering going back to school to get a PhD. Again, that is quite an achievement, so congrats!

Thank you much. Sorry for the wall of text, but you got me going! I had been living and working in California, and found myself at the crest of the dot-com wave of the late 90's and early '00s. But post-SICP, I _had_ to dig deeper. I didn't feel prepared for the schools I wanted to apply to: Berkeley & Stanford. I am totally self-taught, and not having taken an exam in any CS subjects, the subject GRE was a huge ment…

How is cambridge a backup for somehody that thinks stanford or Berkeley are to prestigious?

Also how was it like applying for a PhD without an undergrad?

Re: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you much. Sorry for the wall of text, but you got me going! I had been living and working in California, and found myself at the crest of the dot-com wave of the late 90's and early '00s. But post-SICP, I _had_ to dig deeper. I didn't feel prepared for the schools I wanted to apply to: Berkeley & Stanford. I am totally self-taught, and not having taken an exam in any CS subjects, the subject GRE was a huge ment…

How is cambridge a backup for somehody that thinks stanford or Berkeley are to prestigious? Also how was it like applying for a PhD without an undergrad?

Oh, Cambridge was not a backup option by any means. It is just that they didn't have the subject GRE constraint, which made it one step easier to apply.

As for applying without an undergrad, I was able to parlay my industry work as relevant, because I was applying to the systems group. I'd have had far less trouble if I had just stuck to systems. I would have had to brush up on algorithms and statistics and control systems, and I would have been set.

But noooo, that would have been too easy!!

I found my attention drifting to programming languages, and then I was on totally thin ice.

Re: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]

#118

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'…

This is awesome, can you go a little bit deeper into how you organized your week? Topics you covered each day and how you devided the book to fit into a 1-week study?

I’d love to do this myself with other people! The idea of a "retreat", seeing programming as a hobby is great.

Re: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]

#119

This is so great. I've been working from a terrible scanned copy for years.

The full text has been freely available online for years: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/... Also, the physical book is available for only $40.

Last I looked in Europe the price is more like $65, about the same as a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM.

I know technical books are expensive and the book has 688 pages but it seems expensive.

If somebody wants to ship their used SICP book in Romania I would love to take it. It's on my wish list since forever.

Re: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]

#120
post #95

Heavily inspired by SICP, I am co-teaching CS43 during Stanford Winter quarter. Code: https://github.com/stanfordhaskell/cs43 Site: https://stanford-lambda.gitlab.io All of the course materials will be open-sourced @ https://github.com/stanfordhaskell/cs43 (previously Clojure, now Haskell!) If anyone has concrete suggestions on how to improve our curricula, I would be happy to take any suggestions.

Where might I find the class materials from when you were using Clojure?
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