SICP Book Club

Welcome to the reading group on Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (aka SICP). This book club is directed at experienced or beginner software developers who are interested in learning more about programming (functional programming in particoular).

The book club started inside BBC at the end of 2012 with a weekly meeting followed by an assignment, usually in the form "let's read the next few paragraphs" or "let's do the exercise at the end of the chapter" as an employees only event, but is now open to everyone who wants to work on the book. If you're just starting don't worry, it took us 6 months to get to chapter two! We're going to setup an experienced (after chapter 1) and beginner track. The book uses Scheme for exercises and inline explanations. Although you're strongly encourage to use Scheme, solutions in your favourite language are welcome. Still wondering why we should bother reading a 30 years old book and implement exercises in Scheme?

Please join us every Thursday 18:30-19:30 GMT+00, Starbucks at Oxford Street (Tottenham Court Road). I'll be happy to setup a goole hangout for anyone interested in attending the meeting remotely.

Getting the book

The book main page (with the free HTML version) is here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp
A better alternative for offline reading is the following PDF: http://sicpebook.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/sicp.pdf
People with an iPad go grab https://github.com/ieure/sicp/downloads the EPUB format
If you're a Kindle user go grab the MOBI https://github.com/jonathanpatt/sicp-kindle/blob/master/sicp.mobi
If you prefer the paper copy of the book is available example on Amazon

Supporting tools

A Scheme implementation that works quite good can be installed from the http://www.racket-lang.org/download
A github project is ready to accept your exercises submissions (just send me your github account to be able o have write permissions) https://github.com/reborg/sicpbbc
The same github project hosts the wiki with the Calendar section
The original MIT video lessons
Another modern take at the same book by Brian Harvey from UC Berkeley video

1.3

Rob Shield

reborgml