How to beat SICP?

Question

Lisp

I ask for advice from experienced people :)
I read about what an important book for the education of a SICP programmer and decided to study it. Now I'm sitting in the middle of the second part, on symbolic expressions.
But. Things are moving slowly and slowly. All these recursive concepts and lambda expressions are hard to fit in the brain, and some three-story constructions I can’t even comprehend.
In this regard, there are several questions.
1. Will it get easier after the second chapter or is it still worse?
2. Is it really needed in everyday work? (By work, I mean, for example, some kind of python backend)
3. Does it make sense to plow it for who knows how long, or just read it, solve some problems, and be good?
4. Or maybe by the age of 30 it’s useless to cram this into yourself?

Answer 1

The first reason: The book is not for beginners, as it requires already acquired technical skills.
Another reason could be the "indigestion" of the Scheme syntax, which looks like obfuscated C. It really blows the mind of unprepared beginners and interferes with the perception of theoretical concepts hiding behind a hodgepodge of language constructs.
PS It is also better to read in the original. The translation is bad.
The question of whether you need to work depends on your ambitions. This is a computer theory, which may be far from modern software engineering, but teaches you to think creatively first of all, and not follow ready-made recipes and solutions. This is a plus of books, regardless of the language.
The material can be divided into two main objects of study "functional programming paradigm" and "
If you couldn’t overcome the barrier of perception, but set goals to study these topics:
on the first topic you can find the course Functional Programming Principles in Scala
on the second: Stanford: Compilers.
To move away from the popular Google/StackOverflow Driven development paradigm, it is also worth training algorithmic thinking every day. Write more of your own code. Write algorithms. Solve problems. For example on codewars

Answer 2

I recommend reading diagonally and quickly moving on to practice
when you understand about half of the Python help - you can return to