I haven't had much time to work on SICP in the last couple of weeks, but I consider chapter 1 finished. I have a couple of observations.
I love Scheme. Its a great learning tool. I've spent very little time learning some special syntax and a lot of time learning the underlying concepts. It is remarkably well-suited to thinking recursively. Oddly, it is difficult to do iterative looping. Part of that might have been that the exercises were trying to make me write an iterative algorithm for a problem that was recursive in nature.
The course starts out with no data types other than numbers. This leads to problems and exercises that are very math-heavy. One claim I see often is that you don't need much math beyond high school precalculus for this text. Technically that's true, because the text gives you any formulas you need. I hadn't had any experience with the concept of fixed points o Newton's method, and I completed those sections. Still, I was glad I had studied Simpons' formula in calculus. Moreover, studying infinite series gave me a sense of familiarity with many of the exercises. SICP doesn't require you to solve calculus problems, but I can't help but think that my confusion would be increased greatly if I didn't understand the math behind the exercises.
On to Chapter 2.
