[amackera]

SICP is an amazing book that will make you a better programmer, but might not help you with the task of writing better professional Python programs. If you aspire to understand computing systems from first-principles, there's no better resource that SICP. I've read it multiple times and I learn something new each time.

Do the exercises too!

[cbm-vic-20]

Likewise, TAoCP (er, Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming") is even _older_ than SICP, and will definitely not help with writing better professional Python programs, but is steeped in first-principles goodness. Even so, I end up turning to it every once in a while; once while figuring out some tricky allocation code, and another to see if I could find a way to skip a few steps in a piece of code that needed to run in a tight loop.

It's certainly not required reading to be a successful programmer in the 21st century, but like SICP, it offers a different way of looking at things that may help influence some of your decisions on how to build something.

[f1shy]

> but might not help you with the task of writing better professional Python programs

Let me disagree here: right now I’m doing mentoring with some python programmers where I work, they watch the videos, read the relevant part of the book, and we have a discussion together after each part. I hear constantly “oh yeah, I can apply that here or there”, “this streams concept is so good”, etc etc etc. I think it is most valuable if your background is “only” Algol family languages.

[nine_k]

Somebody said: "I studied Lisp and Haskell to write better Python and Javascript"; I find it extremely applicable to my daily practice.