In my mind, SICP is better as a capstone, senior course. Think about all of us who defend it. Do we think that we could reach a better audience with that message if the audience were seniors looking for a summary/enlightenment, rather than freshmen exploring CS and engineering applications?
Indeed. I read SICP while in grad school w/ the online lectures. Frankly, I'm not sure I would have appreciated SICP nearly as much in my freshman year. With that said UCB and MIT are probably the two places you'd expect to find freshman that would appreciate it. But given the fact that the text is freely available online, and there are great lectures available for free online, it might be reasonable to say that for the inquiring student, they can use MIT's Open Courseware.
Here's an interesting direction to take SICP: http
The link you posted is dead. I'm interested in what it is. Could you post a new link?