Reviews for Structure, logic, and program design

The average rating for Structure, logic, and program design based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-07-11 00:00:00 Mark Jones The book was awesome! Abelson and Sussman have created a masterpiece. It provides a great introduction to computer science. The book contains a lot of back referencing and you need to understand previous material in order to grok what you're currently reading. The exercises are key - you can probably accomplish it without doing them, but they really, really help reinforcing the knowledge. They are also fun to do. The book starts slowly. It might seem a bit basic for the experience programmer, yet I still found it worth to work through the exercises and appreciate the fine points the authors are making. It's worthy to note that the first 2 chapter (out of 5) don't even introduce state. They just elaborate a lot on functions and lists. Chapter 3 becomes more interesting, as state and environments are introduced. The real gem lies in the final two chapters. Chapter 4 covers interpretation. It starts with writing a rudimentary Scheme interpreter (in Scheme) and continues with two modifications - a lazy version and a non-deterministic version (an interpreter that performs backtracking). The chapter concludes with a logical programming language akin to Prolog. Chapter 5 goes into compilation. First it explores a register machine simulator and afterwards it implements a Scheme evaluator in that register machine using the primitive instructions. The final step is writing a compiler that compiles Scheme code to primitive instructions. The cherry on the pie is the last three exercises. First you have to compile your Scheme interpreter to the register machine simulator. Afterwards, you have to implement the evaluator in C (based on the one you wrote for the register machine) and provide with the necessary runtime operations (which mostly means memory and garbage collection). Finally, you modify the compiler to generate C code and compile the interpreter, resulting to a Scheme implementation on C. Apart from fun, the material is a great introduction to a wide variety of topics. If you just want to have a sense about computer science, this is a great book. While it won't go into more advanced topics (such as various compiler optimizations, parsing or advanced data structures), it does a great job of wetting your appetite and giving you and overview. Plus, I cannot state that again - it is so much fun to read and do the exercises. It took me quite a while to read. I've been wanting to complete it for ages. I started seriously in March 2012 with a study group. We managed to keep up to nearly the end of chapter 3, after which I continued on my own. Out of the time since, I've spent 19 weeks in total on reading and doing exercises. I have my solutions (and various other notes) on GitHub:

Review # 2 was written on 2007-12-09 00:00:00 Tony Braswell I read this on the advice of Dr. Eiselt, Dean (at that time) of the College of Computing, after asking him via email "alright, I'm taking classes and whatnot, but I want the Stygian deep; I want to go down as far as I can; I want and need to read those books which have shaped the great computer scientists before me, the real thing." Having probed the shelves of computer science and mathematics since, I remain convinced he could have given no better advice to a precocious freshman. Used for several decades at MIT, this second edition is more than thorough enough for an introduction to computer science anywhere. Taught using the Scheme system (with its close bindings to the type-free λ-calculus), this canonical work covers register machines, logic programming, nondeterministic evaluation, the relations of recursion to iteration, and a wealth of carefully-woven-in jewels from number theory and discrete mathematics. Every programmer thinking himself the real deal owes it to himself to read through this grand work, epic in scope and breathtaking in sudden illuminations.