>>18
Although I'm here only because /prog/ is down, I'm totally serious about recommending SICP to a beginner, and I don't really want to be called a `SICP troll' by someone who hasn't read SICP or understood what it is.

The fact that Scheme is not used outside of academia (and it isn't used inside academia all that much, either) holds no relevance. SICP is not a book about Scheme. It is a book about the basics of programming that happens to use Scheme as a teaching method.