This is a bit off-topic, but something you said resonated with me.
> The PCL book is very much "project based" in that the author walks you through building a couple of actual applications. This is a Good Thing™ for the most part, but it does mean that you don't necessarily get things in the order you might expect.
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> There's a part of me that almost wishes I'd started with a book that takes more of an approach of "programming is ultimately sequence, selection and iteration. Here's how you do sequence in Lisp. Here's how you do selection. Here's how you do iteration. Now here's all the Fancy Lisp Stuff™".
I feel like I'm in the minority in that I prefer to NOT learn things by just "diving in". I am much more successful when I start from the absolute fundamentals. There are objective pros and cons to either approach, but I suspect the success factor is based on one's personality (or some such).
If you start with the fundamentals, it's hard to know if you have any mastery until you try to do something "real". And then you might get frustrated because nobody taught you, e.g., how to do a network call in this programming language. It's also less rewarding because you can spend hours/days/weeks before actually "doing" anything.
If you start by diving in to a project, it's hard to know if you're doing things "the right way" or if you're just porting over bad habits from some other language you're familiar with. Sure, I got it to work, but is it good, or did I just cement in some bad habits?
The first time I drove a standard transmission car, I didn't stall it a single time. Because I read on the internet for a week about how car transmissions work and the difference between a manual and automatic gearbox. I do the same thing with programming languages. The first thing I want to know is what is the memory model approximately like (everything is a reference, values + references, are allocations cheap or expensive), what is the "philosophy" of the language (everything is an object, function composition is the blessed approach, mutability is bad, types are most/least important), etc. Then I want basic mechanisms: loops, iterators, lists or arrays, threads/futures/coroutines. Etc, etc.
That being said, SICP is kind of nice in that it finds an interesting middle ground where you're definitely learning details of the scheme language (applicative order vs normal order, recursion, etc) while it also feels like the details of the language is not the entire point.
No real point here. Just inspired by your comment and thought I'd share my own experience.