It's always interesting seeing the textbooks that are renowned by professors/people with prior knowledge, yet disliked by actual students. The Feynman Lectures on Physics is a pretty famous example (iirc, the actual course was received pretty negatively by students).

I wonder how many people have actually sat down with a bunch of students and done a real experiment with textbooks. It's quite easy to think that a textbook is good when you already understand the material. Only by getting feedback from real students can you truly figure out whether a textbook is good. It'd be interesting to do a course with two different textbooks and the exact same professor and compare feedback/results. Perhaps they could even take the same final exam. Preferably at an average university. One problem with using textbooks written by MIT professors (such as Artin, Strang, etc.) is that MIT students are far stronger than average and can generally skip certain elided steps that other students cannot.

> people with prior knowledge, yet disliked by actual students

This is the key!. I was about to say SICP was great then, yeah, I read it only when get interest in build compilers and after 20 years on the craft.

I think you need a progression on material:

1- Start with a highly practical book more alike build little experiments/programs

"Build a pacgam game" "Make a calculator", etc... ie, do a single pass for the minimal amount of info necessary to build a practical yet rewarding project.

2- Now the student have accomplished their first success, slowdown a little and put a small amount of theory here and there, but put focus on:

"Discipline and follow good practices" then re-do the projects right this time.

To build a analytic mindset move to:

3- How a computer think, using debuggers, disassembles, etc.

You get your hands dirty and see the magic behind the magic

And at the final step (is necessary to put some more steps before, just wanna get to the point):

4- Finish with a well round, deep and wide treaty about the field like SICP, so with some practique behind you can actually see what you have done and how it relate to the new info you are getting now.

Also, this will broad your horizons and open the appetite to get in the deep more.

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I think is to be like how is learn to cook. You start doing simple yet good dishes, without worry to learn first the theory. You move to more challenge, learn techniques tools and tricks of the trade. Finally, move to see the theory behind, round your mental framework and challenge yourself in come with exotic, new dishes...

That’s very well put. I’ve actually really wanted a “cookbook” for compilers. Basically small, self contained lessons for writing a particular part of a compiler. I.e. here’s how to write a typechecker, or how to write a garbage collector. The closest to that I’ve found is Crafting Interpreters. A lot of the compilers textbooks focus on the theory or general concepts, which is great, but I want to get my hands dirty. I’m not reading the book to learn the theory of compilers; I’m reading to book to write a compiler.

"We show that building a compiler can be as easy as building an interpreter. The compiler we construct accepts a large subset of the Scheme programming language and produces assembly code for the Intel x86 architecture, the dominant architecture of personal computing. The development of the compiler is broken into many small incremental steps. Every step yields a fully working compiler for a progressively expanding subset of Scheme. Every compiler step produces real assembly code that can be assembled then executed directly by the hardware."

There is also a work-in-progress effort to write a more extensive textbook that follows the same approach to teaching compiler development, using Racket instead of R5RS Scheme: https://github.com/IUCompilerCourse/Essentials-of-Compilatio...