I would actually advise against the MIT lectures. The authors are much better recorded than live, as it were, and the only videos I could find are of very bad visual quality. The book is written so clearly that it requires no further explanation. But, hey, try them--maybe you'll like them.
Don't skip exercises. All the meat is in the exercises. I think there's a bunch at the end of Chapter 2 that make you write a lot of verbose code, to teach you stuff that you probably already understand if you've done OOP. The ideas explained in that section have since got more than their fair share of popularity in the mainstream. Anyway--I skipped those. But many others I thought I'd skip, only to come back to them later and wish I'd done them the first time.
I'm going to disagree, despite being one that typically doesn't learn well via video (ie peepcode, etc) I feel that I took quite a bit away from watching the original SICP lectures. To each their own, I supposed, but I'd highly recommend at least giving the first one or two a chance.
Don't skip exercises. All the meat is in the exercises. I think there's a bunch at the end of Chapter 2 that make you write a lot of verbose code, to teach you stuff that you probably already understand if you've done OOP. The ideas explained in that section have since got more than their fair share of popularity in the mainstream. Anyway--I skipped those. But many others I thought I'd skip, only to come back to them later and wish I'd done them the first time.