by Harold Abelson, Gerald Sussman, Julie Sussman

isbn: 0262011530
subject: Nonfiction, Computing
finished: 1/5/1998

This is the textbook for the introductory computer science class at MIT. It's based on scheme, and gets into real CS fairly quickly -- I assume that in class it's supplemented with lots of lectures. SICP covers basic programming, scheme's computational model, functional vs. imperative programming, software engineering issues, the philosophy of computer science, and some other advanced topics. It's a rewarding book (the real gems are in the footnotes) and I recommend it to people who want to wrap their heads around the scheme/lisp paradigm.