Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) is a computer science textbook by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman. It is known as the "Wizard Book" in hacker culture. It teaches fundamental principles of computer programming, including recursion, abstraction, modularity, and programming language design and implementation. MIT Press published the first edition in 1984, and the second edition in 1996. It was formerly used as the textbook for MIT's introductory course in computer science. SICP focuses on discovering general patterns for solving specific problems, and building software systems that make use of those patterns. MIT Press published the JavaScript edition in 2022. The book describes computer science concepts using Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. It also uses a virtual register machine and assembler to implement Lisp interpreters and compilers. Topics in the books are: The Elements of Programming Procedures and the Processes They Generate Formulating Abstractions with Higher-Order Procedures Introduction to Data Abstraction Hierarchical Data and the Closure Property Symbolic Data Multiple Representations for Abstract Data Systems with Generic Operations Assignment and Local State The Environment Model of Evaluation Modeling with Mutable Data Concurrency: Time Is of the Essence Streams The Metacircular Evaluator Variations on a Scheme – Lazy Evaluation Variations on a Scheme – Nondeterministic Computing Logic Programming Designing Register Machines A Register-Machine Simulator Storage Allocation and Garbage Collection The Explicit-Control Evaluator Compilation Several fictional characters appear in the book: Alyssa P. Hacker, a Lisp hacker Ben Bitdiddle Cy D. Fect, a "reformed C programmer" Eva Lu Ator Lem E. Tweakit Louis Reasoner, a loose reasoner The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. The book was used as the textbook for MIT's former introductory programming course, 6.