Long time readers know that I am a big fan of Abelson and Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and that I consider it the best book ever written about computer programming. I have the on-line version permanently bookmarked in my browsers and, of course, I have a PDF version on my computers.
Today I came across Jonathan Patt’s sicp-kindle repository on github, so of course I downloaded it and after some Googling around I discovered how to load it into the Kindle app on my iPad1. I like the iBooks app slightly more than the Kindle app so I looked around to see if someone had SICP in ePub format.
It turns out that Ian Eure has SICP in ePub format in another github repository. From the README files it appeared that the Kindle version was in better shape but I downloaded the iBooks format too so that I could compare them. I couldn’t see a lot of difference with a quick skimming so either version should be fine. Of course, if you have a Kindle, you’ll want the .mobi version.
I’m not sure that I’ll ever need to check SICP when I’m away from my computers but if I do it’s nice to know that I’ve got a copy tucked away on my iPad. Having all those copies of SICP lying around on my computers probably sounds a little obsessive but there’s also a .info version for reading in Emacs that I don’t have so my addiction is still under control. Mostly.
Footnotes:
1 The easiest way is to email the .mobi file to yourself and then open the email with the iPad mail app. Clicking on the Kindle icon in the email will open the book in the Kindle app and save it to your Kindle library.