Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, JavaScript Edition

This book introduces the reader to central ideas of computation by establishing a series of mental models for computation. Earlier editions used the programming language Scheme in their program examples. This new version of the second edition has been adapted for JavaScript.

The JavaScript programs included in the book run in any implementation of the language that complies with the ECMAScript 2020 specification, using the JavaScript package sicp provided by the MIT Press website.

The first three chapters of the book cover programming concepts that are common to all modern high-level programming languages. Chapters four and five, which used Scheme to formulate language processors for Scheme, required significant revision. Chapter four offers new material, in particular an introduction to the notion of program parsing. The evaluator and compiler in chapter five introduce a subtle stack discipline to support return statements (a prominent feature of statement-oriented languages) without sacrificing tail recursion.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs has had a dramatic impact on computer science curricula over the past decade. This long-awaited revision contains changes throughout the text.