Description:

Abelson and Sussman's classic Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs teaches readers how to program by employing the tools of abstraction and modularity. The material in this book has been the basis of MIT's entry-level computer science subject since 1980. The authors' central philosophy is that programming is the task of breaking large problems into small ones. The book spends a great deal of time considering both this decomposition and the process of knitting the smaller pieces back together. The authors employ this philosophy in their writing technique. The text asks the broad question "What is programming?" Having come to the conclusion that programming consists of procedures and data, the authors set off to explore the related questions of "What is data?" and "What is a procedure?" The authors build up the simple notion of a procedure to dizzying complexity. The discussion culminates in the description of the code behind the programming language Scheme. The authors finish with examples of how to implement some of the book's concepts on a register machine. Through this journey, the reader not only learns how to program, but also how to think about programming. This edition emphasizes several new themes. The most important of these is the central role played by different approaches to dealing with time in computational models: objects with state, concurrent programming, functional programming, lazy evaluation, and nondeterministic programming. We have included new sections on concurrency and nondeterminism, and we have tried to integrate this theme throughout the book.