Widely adopted as a textbook, this book has its origins in a popular entry-level computer science course taught by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman at MIT.
Earlier editions used the programming language Scheme in their program examples. This version of the second edition has been adapted for JavaScript.The first three chapters cover programming concepts that are common to all modern high-level programming languages.
Chapters four and five, which used Scheme to formulate language processors for Scheme, required significant revision. Chapter four offers new material, in particular an introduction to the notion of program parsing.
The evaluator and compiler in chapter five introduce a subtle stack discipline to support return statements (a prominent feature of statement-oriented languages) without sacrificing tail recursion.
The JavaScript programs included in the book run in any implementation of the language that complies with the ECMAScript 2020 specification, using the JavaScript package sicp provided by the MIT Press website.