I'm going to disagree with a sibling of my comment and suggest that you're not going to be able to "bang through this" at 4 hours a week over the course of a month or two. That comes out to 16-32 hours total, which is just a pitiful amount of time, less than a full time week of work. I just don't think so, unless you really are above-average. After all, it was the basis for many first semesters of CS at MIT, and most (even introductory) CS classes require more dedication than 4 hours a week, and are usually more like 10-12 weeks long.
It does depend a lot on your background, because there are large sections of the book that rely on examples taken from electrical engineering and mathematics. These could be tough going if you aren't that familiar with calculus, complex arithmetic, or simple digital circuits. I think it's the biggest flaw in the book, and others have criticized this as well.
That said, I really hope not to scare anyone off! You can skip things you struggle with and come back to them, but I do think at least reading the whole thing and attempting all of the exercises is really valuable (there are over 350 exercises, of varying difficulty).
So I would try it out, read through the first chapter and see what you think. You may not find it as magical and wonderful as others have, but you might. And you have to ask yourself why you're reading it. You might find that you don't want to bang through it as fast as you can, just so you can tell your colleagues you read it. You might find that it opens up a whole world of alternative programming languages, interpreters and compilers, and it might just be the opening of the rabbit hole, that you won't find the bottom of for years. If that's the case, the great Lisp books: PAIP, LiSP, EOPL, AMOP ... they're all waiting for you. At least, that's what's happened to me.
It does depend a lot on your background, because there are large sections of the book that rely on examples taken from electrical engineering and mathematics. These could be tough going if you aren't that familiar with calculus, complex arithmetic, or simple digital circuits. I think it's the biggest flaw in the book, and others have criticized this as well.
That said, I really hope not to scare anyone off! You can skip things you struggle with and come back to them, but I do think at least reading the whole thing and attempting all of the exercises is really valuable (there are over 350 exercises, of varying difficulty).
So I would try it out, read through the first chapter and see what you think. You may not find it as magical and wonderful as others have, but you might. And you have to ask yourself why you're reading it. You might find that you don't want to bang through it as fast as you can, just so you can tell your colleagues you read it. You might find that it opens up a whole world of alternative programming languages, interpreters and compilers, and it might just be the opening of the rabbit hole, that you won't find the bottom of for years. If that's the case, the great Lisp books: PAIP, LiSP, EOPL, AMOP ... they're all waiting for you. At least, that's what's happened to me.