Wizard Book n. Hal Abelson's, Jerry Sussman's and Julie Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (MIT Press, 1984; ISBN 0-262-01077-1), an excellent computer science text used in introductory courses at MIT. So called because of the wizard on the jacket. One of the bibles of the LISP/Scheme world. Also, less commonly, known as the Purple Book.
from The New Hacker's Dictionary, 2nd edition
(MIT Press, 1993)


This site is a companion to the influential computer-science text Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman. Its purpose is to demonstrate the Web's potential to be a channel for innovative support for textbook users.

The material on this site is aimed at instructors using SICP as a course text, and at people using the book for self-study.


Currently at this site you will find:

Full text!
The complete text in HTML.

Creative Commons License
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License by the MIT Press.

Sample programming assignments
This is a collection of assignments, developed for the course at MIT, which instructors can download and modify. Each assignment contains an extensive write-up and all necessary source code.

Code from the book
These files contain all source code from the book, in a form suitable for loading and running.

Instructor's Manual
Contains discussions of exercises and other material in the text as well as supplementary material, additional examples and exercises, and teaching suggestions. An appendix summarizes the Scheme programming language as used in the text, showing at what point in the text each element of Scheme is introduced.

Errata   last posted 08/09/99

How to get Scheme
SICP uses the Scheme dialect of Lisp. Scheme implementations are available for most common platforms. From MIT, we supply free implementations of the MIT Scheme programming environment. This page provides information on how to obtain copies of MIT Scheme as well as other implementations.

A note on our course at MIT
This note describes the organization of our course as MIT, as well as an overview of the educational approach underlying the course and SICP. There is also a sample syllabus for the course.

Schools using SICP
A partial and growing list of universities and colleges that are using SICP for either an introductory or an advanced course.

Comments or questions Contact Us.


Last modified: Thu Apr 5 2018