Maybe at MIT an "introductory course" means something a lot different than the school I went to, but SICP covered a lot of stuff in more depth than my entire CS degree did. I'm referring mostly to the 4th and 5th chapters, which cover language implementation right down to the hardware. Are those chapters included in MIT's "introductory" computer science course?
My impression, and I recall this from reading the introduction, is that the fourth chapter is included--just like at Berkeley--but the fifth chapter isn't.
The way the Berkeley intro course series is structured, it actually makes sense to not teach the fifth chapter in the first class: the idea is that you go from the top down, starting with really high abstractions and working your way down to building a computer out of logic gates. The fifth chapter fits in with the latter portion more than with the rest of SICP.
Also, MIT doesn't teach SICP at all in its intro course any more, as far as I know. They've also switched to Python, but I don't think they've kept the book, structure or material from the Scheme course (unlike what Berkeley is doing here).
Comments
Maybe at MIT an "introductory course" means something a lot different than the school I went to, but SICP covered a lot of stuff in more depth than my entire CS degree did. I'm referring mostly to the 4th and 5th chapters, which cover language implementation right down to the hardware. Are those chapters included in MIT's "introductory" computer science course?
My impression, and I recall this from reading the introduction, is that the fourth chapter is included--just like at Berkeley--but the fifth chapter isn't.
The way the Berkeley intro course series is structured, it actually makes sense to not teach the fifth chapter in the first class: the idea is that you go from the top down, starting with really high abstractions and working your way down to building a computer out of logic gates. The fifth chapter fits in with the latter portion more than with the rest of SICP.
Also, MIT doesn't teach SICP at all in its intro course any more, as far as I know. They've also switched to Python, but I don't think they've kept the book, structure or material from the Scheme course (unlike what Berkeley is doing here).