If not SICP, then what? Maybe HTDP?
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.