Open-Source High-quality PDF of SICP

by oinksoft • 14 years ago

277 67 14 years ago

squidsoup2• 14 years ago

Looks like there are epub and mobi versions out there as well. Great to see community efforts to keep this excellent book alive.

https://github.com/ieure/sicp (epub)

https://github.com/twcamper/sicp-kindle (mobi)

pooriaazimi2• 14 years ago

This ePub version seems nicer. The original author (ieure) hasn't had an update for two years... This guy's fork is just two days old: https://github.com/Paladin/sicp/

StavrosK• 14 years ago

Here's the built version of that (it might have the proper cover, I'm not sure what Calibre did with the metadata), because I love you guys:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/vio1m4

nimrody• 14 years ago

Too bad epub/mobi do not support nice typesetting of equations (except as images). At least this was the situation last time I checked.

Is it different now? (Not that SICP is heavy on math...)

nessus422• 14 years ago

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

PhearTheCeal2• 14 years ago

What dialect of Lisp should I use to follow along the book with?

squidsoup2• 14 years ago

Scheme of some sort ideally - either MIT Scheme or Racket will do nicely. I seem to recall that someone was working on a version of SICP with examples in Clojure, but it may be incomplete.

http://racket-lang.org/

JoelMcCracken3• 14 years ago

Yeah, the SICP in Clojure project died pretty early on.

Quite a bit of SICP would be awkward to translate into a language that doesn't support TCO, such as Clojure.

irahul5• 14 years ago

> What dialect of Lisp should I use to follow along the book with?

Any dialect of lisp will do fine if you know the language. SICP uses Scheme which is a lisp-1 and mandates TCO. You can very well use lisp-2 viz. Common Lisp - you will have to do the translation for passing/calling function references, and your common lisp might not implement TCO. But none of it is required to follow the book.

plafl• 14 years ago

The most complete and user friendly by a long margin is racket. I remember however some problems with set-car!/set-cdr! in doing the exercises. Maybe you will need to change the language to RSR6 with #lang

takikawa• 14 years ago

The easiest way to use SICP with Racket is to use the sicp.plt package on the package repository: http://planet.racket-lang.org/package-source/neil/sicp.plt/1...

splicer• 14 years ago

I got a kick out of this: "You are probably reading it in an Info hypertext browser, such as the Info mode of Emacs. You might alternatively be reading it TeX-formatted on your screen or printer, though that would be silly."

baxrob2• 14 years ago

Just to note, it's even tastier with the videos: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

PhearTheCeal2• 14 years ago

Is there a higher resolution version of these? Or perhaps a copy with better sound?

baxrob2• 14 years ago

Yeah, I don't remember them looking/sounding so choppy. And the download looks as bad as the stream. I googled "sicp videos highres" and there's torrent on piratebay that appears to have larger video files.

ufo• 14 years ago

I remember that the old site had links to torrents of the videos you could download. However, I can't find them in the new site...

zokier• 14 years ago

The original SICP text seems to licensed with CC-BY-SA, and this PDF version has GPL license slapped on it. Is that legal? GPL is more restrictive than the original license after all.

pygy_• 14 years ago

AFAIK, a file is not coverered under the GPL unless it sports a notice that says so.

Putting the GPL in a directory doesn't render its content covered by the license.

In this case, there's no indication in the files that they are covered by anything.

The README clearly states that the texi source is CC licensed, though.

So, even if the repository owner intended to release this under the GPL, his actions are void.

AlisdairO2• 14 years ago

Probably, I'd expect. Derivative works under more restrictive licenses are usually fine (as long as this isn't explicitly disallowed) - it's making a derivative work under a less restrictive license where you're more likely to run into issues.

IvarTJ• 14 years ago

It is explicitly disallowed by the share-alike clause.

tjr• 14 years ago

The copy of the GPL in that folder might be there for the sake of texinfo.tex.

barking2• 14 years ago

OT, I am not familiar with GitHub and I know it's much more than a download site. As a Download site, however, I don't think it's very user friendly. You think you've have what you want when you see the file icon but that isn't clickable. 'Raw' doesn't sound very good and neither does 'History' Then 'Downloads' link looks like a link to a more general page than the Download link for this file in particular. Through trial and error I found what I was looking for after not too long but it left me feeling a little stupid and irritated at the same time.

Edit: it reminded me of this http://okcancel.com/comic/4.html

mnazim• 14 years ago

GitHub is not a download site.

It's a service that enables collaborative coding by providing hosting for your with git repositories. Think of it as a SourceForge of 2012(though, this could be a debatable topic).

barking2• 14 years ago

So I guess the theory is that most projects that are hosted on Github will have a product site somewhere else where ordinary users are presented with a simple download button

bjz• 14 years ago

Click on the zip icon to download it: https://img.skitch.com/20120726-nd9jxi6gwa32tnkjxwrehewpcn.p...

You can also download it directly from the website if you don't want the source code bundled along with it: http://sicpebook.wordpress.com/ebook/

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

I actually bought the paperback of this but haven't got around to reading it yet.

How long would it take someone of average programming skill (with no lisp/scheme background) to bang through this at say 4 hours a week? Is it even worth reading the entire thing as opposed to a few chapters?

edwkar• 14 years ago

It's hard to approximate how long time you'll use, since it depends so much on what ideas you are familiar with, but I'd say that SICP is generally a nice and "easy" read for a programmer with some experience. I don't mean to say that the material is "easy" -- far from it, there's a lot of challenges and brain-twisters -- but the writing is IMO very good, and the book builds up nicely. You should also complement your reading by watching some of the videos of Abelson and Sussman teaching 6.001 (especially Lecture 1A, and Sussman's lectures on meta-circular interpreters).

Also, yeah, read the entire thing! You could skip some sections, but I would advice you to mostly move linearly from the start.

DannoHung• 14 years ago

It's pretty easy going until the last chapter, I thought.

Maybe a month or two, depending on how much free time you have and how many exercises you decide to do. More if you're an exercise completionist. I only did the ones I thought sounded interesting, honestly.

spacemanaki2• 14 years ago

I'm going to disagree with a sibling of my comment and suggest that you're not going to be able to "bang through this" at 4 hours a week over the course of a month or two. That comes out to 16-32 hours total, which is just a pitiful amount of time, less than a full time week of work. I just don't think so, unless you really are above-average. After all, it was the basis for many first semesters of CS at MIT, and most (even introductory) CS classes require more dedication than 4 hours a week, and are usually more like 10-12 weeks long.

It does depend a lot on your background, because there are large sections of the book that rely on examples taken from electrical engineering and mathematics. These could be tough going if you aren't that familiar with calculus, complex arithmetic, or simple digital circuits. I think it's the biggest flaw in the book, and others have criticized this as well.

That said, I really hope not to scare anyone off! You can skip things you struggle with and come back to them, but I do think at least reading the whole thing and attempting all of the exercises is really valuable (there are over 350 exercises, of varying difficulty).

So I would try it out, read through the first chapter and see what you think. You may not find it as magical and wonderful as others have, but you might. And you have to ask yourself why you're reading it. You might find that you don't want to bang through it as fast as you can, just so you can tell your colleagues you read it. You might find that it opens up a whole world of alternative programming languages, interpreters and compilers, and it might just be the opening of the rabbit hole, that you won't find the bottom of for years. If that's the case, the great Lisp books: PAIP, LiSP, EOPL, AMOP ... they're all waiting for you. At least, that's what's happened to me.

nessus422• 14 years ago

I'm not sure how much you'd get out of it by "banging" through it. I took SICP at MIT my first semester freshman year, and this class changed my life. I can't even begin to express how amazing I found it. I went to MIT because I wanted to study neutron stars and black holes, and I found SICP to be even more amazing than those, so I changed majors. Since I put a great deal of effort into the class, many of the techniques discussed in the book are still second nature to me.

In the the MIT class, you were expected to put in 15 hours a week for 14 weeks, which is the length of an MIT semester. I probably put in double that, because I loved the materials and exercises so much. (Due to my efforts I did get one of the very best grades in the class, out of 200+ students, but it wasn't necessary to work quite that hard to do well in the class. I'm sure that one could have learned a great deal with the recommendation of 15 hours.)

I'm sure that you can still get a great deal out of the book just by reading it carefully, and that would take a small fraction of the time that it would take to treat the book like a real class. But the best way to learn, of course, is always by doing!

P.S. Be sure to watch the lectures for the class, which are online, albeit in a somewhat abbreviated form. In fact, it might be best just to start with them, and see how you like them.

uxp• 14 years ago

For the more curious, here are the video lectures on the First Edition of SICP presented by Hal Abelson and Gerald Sussman: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...

brlewis• 14 years ago

The book does not assume its readers have any background in Scheme. Go slowly though the first few chapters and do the exercises. That will help acclimate you.

joelthelion• 14 years ago

What would be awesome would be a nice EPUB version.

kot-behemoth• 14 years ago

squidsoup replied earlier (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4294369) with this EPUB repo: https://github.com/ieure/sicp

peapicker• 14 years ago

I, for one, would very much like to read an article about the preparation of this document and the various tools used in the toolchain, as well as the workflow -- it could serve as a primer for 'how to do ebooks' for the future that I would enjoy greatly.

It looks like Inkscape for the SVG editor, and texinfo for the text, but I know enough to know it would be nice to know what if any special config was done to get the nice fonts, etc.

derekp72• 14 years ago

Does anyone know how to make a smaller page sized PDF from this texinfo source? Specifically, I'd like to target the screen size of the popular 7-inch tablets.

oinksoft• 14 years ago

Have you looked at https://github.com/sarabander/sicp-pocket ?

derekp72• 14 years ago

Ah, that looks like it could work. Only thing it needs is to have the code sections printed with a smaller font, cause many of them currently run off the screen (I see that they are still working on that part).

gbog• 14 years ago

I understand this is lisp version of SICP but heard the course is now taught with python. I searched and couldn't find this python version online though. Someone have some hindsight?

ichthyos• 14 years ago

6.001, the introductory CS course at MIT that used SICP, is no longer offered--it's been replaced with 6.01, a survey of EECS that uses Python.

However, UCBerkeley has replaced its Scheme-based SICP class with a Python-based SICP class, CS61A, taught by John Denero: http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa11/61a-python/con...

rmk• 14 years ago

This is great! Thanks!

ziffusion• 14 years ago

Am I the only one who can't open this in Acrobat?

cellularmitosis• 14 years ago

I split this book up into chapters:

http://jason.pepas.com/sicp/sicp-ebook-split-into-chapters/

by using pdftk:

  pdftk A=SICP.pdf cat A25-117 output SICP_chapter_1.pdf
  pdftk A=SICP.pdf cat A118-286 output SICP_chapter_2.pdf
  pdftk A=SICP.pdf cat A287-460 output SICP_chapter_3.pdf
  pdftk A=SICP.pdf cat A461-624 output SICP_chapter_4.pdf
  pdftk A=SICP.pdf cat A625-777 output SICP_chapter_5.pdf

I then use some booklet-preparation software to turn it into booklets which I could print out at Kinko's, because I didn't want to have to haul around the entire book with me:

http://jason.pepas.com/sicp/sicp-ebook-split-into-chapters/b...

Open-Source High-quality PDF of SICP

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