After I began to follow the “Functional Programming Principles in Scala” course on coursera (btw, you can find the feedback about this course on Quroa), in which part of the teaching materials are taken from SICP, I was inspired to go through the whole SICP book and finish all the exercises.
I know there are already a lot of resources and discussions about this book both here on SO and other places online. However, seems no particular comments about the video lectures themselves by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, my question here is: is it worth watching (or necessary to watch) the videos? Are there any excellent stuff covered in the lectures only?
Introducing my background a little bit may be helpful to answer my question: I am a professional programmer, code in c++/python at work, learned some basic concepts in functional programming and went through the Chapter 1 of SICP without difficulty in understanding the material and doing most of the exercises.
Be aware that the video lectures reference the first edition of the book, and the current edition is the second one. So they’re a little outdated and give a different treatment or use slightly different examples to subjects present in the newest edition of the book, and some sections are missing altogether (for example: concurrent programming).
But anyway, the video lectures are worth your time. It’s fantastic watching the authors of the book explaining the concepts in their own words, and watching Gerald Sussman in a wizard costume in the lecture of the metacircular evaluator is absolutely priceless.