http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html

In this article, Functional Programming For The Rest of Us, the author gives a bit of history about Lambda calculus. Church formalized the lambda calculus and later it was found that it was equivalent in computing power to Turing Machines

In the  section on ‘Benefits of FP’, the author gives examples like debugging. However I have read elsewhere that composing programs is the greatest advantage. That paper was ‘Why Functional Programming matters’ by Hughes

Other sections are

Higher Order Functions –

Currying

Lazy Evaluation – In this ‘infinite streams’ are discussed. Can be read in conjunction with SICP

Continuation – Web continuations are discussed.  It seems to be related to work by Shriram Krishnamurthi at Brown University

Closures

 

http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/  gives a fun introduction to the subject

 

SICP discusses  Metalinguistic abstraction  ( tackle complexity by building suitable language )