Comment by jnordwick

That book was my first programming class and programming ever: CS61A at Berkeley. When I started taking it, one of the TAs said that the ideas in the class were wasted on us - they seemed simple but we wouldn't grasp the fullness of the ideas until we had more experience. He said the class should be required to take twice: your first and last class.

It gives you basics of things like recursion and message passing that are easy to use immediately (well, once you figure them out -- it took me two weeks to be able to write even the simplest recursive function), but there are large conceptual things you won't really see the depth in until you have more experience. The last project is the meta-circular evaluator - writing a scheme program to interpret scheme programs. It is difficult to understand that without having a lot of other background.

Even then along the way learning things like exceptions as implemented through call/cc might be a little too much for a beginner programming. The book is in some ways talks about concepts way outside of a beginner's comfort zone.