SICP Distilled

SICP Distilled is one of the most interesting Kickstarter projects I’ve seen in a while.

Its creator Tom Hall is planning to create some nice companion resources for SICP with code examples in Clojure. In his own words:

It’s a long book, with lots of exercises and lots of people I know have started, loved it, but somehow not finished.

Abelson and Sussman themselves highlight the important lessons of SICP in their paper Lisp: A Language For Stratified Design and I have my own favourite bits.

As the book itself is available online for free I want to make the perfect accompaniment to it - an ebook summarising the key ideas, short videos describing them, screencasts of solving some of the exercises, translation of the examples into Clojure, example projects, partial solutions for you to complete (similar to 4clojure and Clojure koans) and a place to discuss solving them with people and hopefully keep momentum and get it finished!

Something to be enjoyed alongside SICP, rather than completely replace it.

Maybe some ideas come out a little different in Clojure, or I take a slightly novel approach (hence idiosyncratic), maybe I miss something out (hence tour, sorry), but I hope we can have some fun along the way.

– Tom Hall, SICP Distilled

I’m one of those many people who never did finish SICP (although I hope to do that some day), so I can totally relate to Tom’s words. I’ve already backed his campaign and I hope more of you will do the same!