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Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#12

Post by Dudester230602 »

collyw wrote: post #6
adastra22 wrote: post #3

Your milage will vary. I got zero value from the books. They do make a good doorstop though.

Thanks for being honest about it. Sad to see that it's downvoted. I guess people spent the time and effort and don't want to admit it might not have been valuable.

Maybe people are still in a denial that all companies want is some LeetCode and funny scripting languages.

Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#13

Post by Jtsummers »

wodenokoto wrote: post #8

I thought the books where a kind of reference material, rather than a guided study.

It's both. The texts are comprehensive and go into great detail on the covered material. There are also a large number of exercises throughout. It's suitable as both a reference text and a study text.

Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#14

Post by defrost »

collyw wrote: post #6
adastra22 wrote: post #3

Your milage will vary. I got zero value from the books. They do make a good doorstop though.

Thanks for being honest about it. Sad to see that it's downvoted. I guess people spent the time and effort and don't want to admit it might not have been valuable.

The comment above clearly and honestly stated that "your mileage may vary".

Generally people that continue reading through TAOCP and invest the time and effort in doing so do get value from that or are foolish to keep going.

I read the early volumes thoroughly in the 80s and 90s and got a lot of insight into, for one example, methods for constraining error when doing chained numerical calculations.

His approach alone was inspiring at the time even if specific chapters weren't of any immediate interest.

They're not especially useful for general journeyman programmers and they're but one star in the firmament for people aiming higher .. but they are worth the effort if the material is of interest.

Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#15

Post by varjag »

collyw wrote: post #6
adastra22 wrote: post #3

Your milage will vary. I got zero value from the books. They do make a good doorstop though.

Thanks for being honest about it. Sad to see that it's downvoted. I guess people spent the time and effort and don't want to admit it might not have been valuable.

There's hardly a chance that one would both (a) read through all of TAoCP and (b) not extract any value from that. The attention required to wade through the books can't be sustained if you have no interest.

Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#16

Post by bmacho »

oytis wrote: post #11

As a pastime, maybe. For a practitioner CLRS offers better value for time spent IMO, and is not devoid of mathematical rigor either.

Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein : Introduction to Algorithms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms

Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#17

Post by rzzzwilson »

If you are at all interested in computer science, read volume 1. If you want to go further after that look at the other volumes.

> he told me the book may be trying too hard

Knuth isn't trying to write a novel or something to learn from, rather a concise, comprehensive attempt to cover the field of Computer Science. It's a repository of knowledge. He marks some exercises at 50 which, from memory, means that if you can solve it fully you are in the running for a Turing award. One of the Python core developers was once asked what the developers did in their sparetime: We read Knuth so you don't have to [0].

[0] https://www.norvig.com/quotations.html

Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#18

Post by txs »

collyw wrote: post #6
adastra22 wrote: post #3

Your milage will vary. I got zero value from the books. They do make a good doorstop though.

Thanks for being honest about it. Sad to see that it's downvoted. I guess people spent the time and effort and don't want to admit it might not have been valuable.

How do you measure the value? I treasure these books, they've brought me so much joy over the years. They've likely not affected my career trajectory much, but they've absolutely enriched my personal life.
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