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No, but it's on my list of things to read when I get time. Neither of your 'No' responses match what I suspect is a relatively common sentiment.
I have no idea what it is, and since the poster didn't think it was worth his time to type out four words to define it, I don't see why it's worth my time to scan through the comments here to find out.
So I chose the first option, which at least has "No" in the title.
Personally, I'm a physician with an undergrad in physics, played with logo and basic as a kid. I picked up SICP and got to chapter 2 or 3 on my own time last summer but set it down to go learn Python as it was pretty obvious Abelson and Sussman expect you to either be a bachelor's degree candidate with a lot of time to work on this, or you have a substantial background understanding to bring to bear. I tried Ruby but…
> Brian Harvey's Scheme lectures at Berkeley [...] unfortunately they're gone now I clicked around a little bit at Berkeley's site and found this: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,s,All,3E89002AA9B9879... It's looks like it should be the lectures you watched.
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You can also get better compiler texts, these days. I recommend starting with Niklaus Wirth's _Compiler Construction_ ( http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/books/CompilerConstruc... ), then Andrew Appel's _Modern Compiler Implementation in ML_. I have a comment linking together several threads of compiler-related advice on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922002 .
I had a hard time with Appel's _Modern Compiler Implementation in ML_ when I did the compiler course (7 years ago...) for my CS major. I much preferred _Modern Compiler Design_ by Dick Grune et al. ( http://www.dickgrune.com/Books/MCD_1st_Edition/ ). A second edition seems to be in the pipeline ( http://www.dickgrune.com/Books/MCD_2nd_Edition/ ).
I'd suggest e.g. "On Lisp" for every experienced programmer, which is available for free too, in case you are not already a crazy LISP hacker, THAT'll learn ya! It is amazing how easy it is to do a couple extremely complex looking, universally applicable tasks (query parsing and processing, pattern matching, ...) - once you grokked a couple of concept you don't get exposed to normally in your mainstream language.
Personally, I'm a physician with an undergrad in physics, played with logo and basic as a kid. I picked up SICP and got to chapter 2 or 3 on my own time last summer but set it down to go learn Python as it was pretty obvious Abelson and Sussman expect you to either be a bachelor's degree candidate with a lot of time to work on this, or you have a substantial background understanding to bring to bear. I tried Ruby but…
Abelson and Sussman expect you to either be a bachelor's degree candidate with a lot of time to work on this I think that's to be expected for a university course textbook.
Just about every class at MIT is like this. That is, professors assume you have the time and energy to learn things the "right way" and will really give you everything they've got. They usually forget the fact that students have usually 3 or 4 other classes like this which makes for quite a tough curriculum.
I personally loved this aspect of MIT. It's not the most practical or concise way to do things, though. If you're new to CS or just looking to get up on something quickly, definitely don't feel bad to look elsewhere.
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I have this book as well has "How to Prove it." They cover virtually the same material, however I found the prose in "The Haskell Road" to be stilted and sometimes confusing. I got much more out of "How to Prove it."
Interesting; thank you for providing your perspective. Both books indeed share most of the topics, although from glancing at both TOCs HR seems to add Polynomials and Corecursion. I'll gladly keep this in mind should I get stuck with HR.
It is true that HR covers Polynomials and Corecursion. If I were you, I'd order both and use How to Prove it if you get stuck with The Haskell Road. They're both very inexpensive.
Yes, I have :) http://eli.thegreenplace.net/category/programming/lisp/sicp/
I'm through about 25% of it, but I decided to do all of the exercises in Haskell rather than Scheme. In a way it improves the experience as a whole, thanks to type errors slowly prodding me in the right direction.