--- Sergey Goldgaber <sgoldgaber@yahoo.com> wrote:
> How would you say it compares to the SICP?

SICP is an excellent book that touches on just about
every field of computer science and I also highly
recommend it, but it isn't the best way to learn
programming.  The PLT folk have written their own
critique of SICP

http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~robby/publications/papers/htdp-sicp-fdpe2002.pdf

which gives some of the background to their own work
with How to Design Programs.

> Someone here mentioned "Programming Perl".  The
> earlier, Perl 4
> version, was what I'd consider a tutorial.  It
> wasn't at all math
> heavy and was very practical.  "The Perl Cookbook"
> is another
> amazing book 

I agree that these are both good practical books. 
Neither SICP or HtDP have the same aim so it would be
wrong to compare them.  If you after "The O'Caml
Cookbook" neither SICP or HtDP will get you any
further along that goal.  On the other hand, if you
want to think more in a functional style they help.

> But the downside is that they use Lisp,
> and that means that I have to learn yet another
> language. 

The Scheme dialect actually, but anyway...  I think
its well worth learning Scheme.  In many ways O'Caml
is a statically Scheme, with somewhat different
syntax.

Noel

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