As a student of NEU, I personally swear by this resource. Having been a part of the staff of the course for 3 years now, I can say that students love to bitch about Racket at the start, but few curse it's name by the end.
I wish more people were as excited by Racket as I am.
As a freshman who took the course that uses this book, I can say I'm still cursing the name. I figure some of the value will become clearer, but aside from commenting functions clearly and testability of code, I don't think I got much of value from it.
I've seen the benefits of teaching freshman (and anyone) functional programming first.
The "comments" are really an introduction to type systems, along with general good practice.
The ability to describe a function by purely it's signature without the presence of mutation makes reasoning through hard problems more straightforward.
I'm coming to NEU this spring and excited to see Scheme there. I followed few chapters from SICP some time ago, and am curious how similar/different is HTDP from SICP?
I wish more people were as excited by Racket as I am.