I am slowly working through the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP).
I choose to work through this book. Its going to take me a while as I am doing it between work, side projects and life in general. I will finish eventually.
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LISPs always has scared me a little. The s-expressions are scary to a new LISPer, Macros can be hard to understand, and many examples of great lisp programs are in very complex fields which require extensive domain knowledge. With all of these things, lisp can be a bit intimidating to programmers. Lisps have often been called far ahead of their time, with many lispers still feeling they are ahead. I had to know what this was all about.
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SICP is a classic. It gets mentioned all of the time in lists of the best Computer Science and Programming books. Given the amount of work required to truly do every question in the book, I actually expect many people resort to simply reading many of the sections. With a book this popular though, many people have indeed completed a very high portion of the book. There is actually a tremendous amount of informations and explanations for SICP, especially in chapters 1-3.
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While I fully realize I likely will not be using much lisp in a production setting (Unless something like Clojure takes off, of course) I am certain that this book will provide me much value.