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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?

#41

Post by Jtsummers »

djtango wrote: post #40
nickcw wrote: post #35

I've read most of Volumes 1-3 of TAOCP. I think you can read at various levels though. When I say I've read most of Volumes 1-3, I mean literally that, I read the text through. At that level it isn't too difficult to read, and you'll learn a lot like that. However some bits I've studied in much greater detail, like for instance the multi-precision arithmetic algorithms which I had to implement. For that I read it mul…

the hard ones are unsolved research problems? I haven't read the book, so he poses research questions as exercises to the reader...?

Yes. He has a system for assigning difficulty ratings to exercises. I don't have the books at hand, but the highest level were open research problems, potentially suitable for PhD work and the like.

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

#42

Post by Jtsummers »

mariusor wrote: post #39
max_k wrote: post #34

This is certainly a matter of taste. I saw many prominent people everywhere praising TAOCP, but I was disappointed when I finally read the first three books some 10+ years ago. So much disappointed that I regret taking all the time to read it - not because they're bad books, but because I think that time would have been better spent learning things a different way. What bothered me most is MIX. I think using a very l…

Did nobody create a MIX virtual machine or compiler in all this time?

Yes, and also for MMIX, the successor version.

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

#43

Post by elkekeer »

djtango wrote: post #40
nickcw wrote: post #35

I've read most of Volumes 1-3 of TAOCP. I think you can read at various levels though. When I say I've read most of Volumes 1-3, I mean literally that, I read the text through. At that level it isn't too difficult to read, and you'll learn a lot like that. However some bits I've studied in much greater detail, like for instance the multi-precision arithmetic algorithms which I had to implement. For that I read it mul…

the hard ones are unsolved research problems? I haven't read the book, so he poses research questions as exercises to the reader...?

Who wouldn't?

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

#44

Post by kbob »

djtango wrote: post #40
nickcw wrote: post #35

I've read most of Volumes 1-3 of TAOCP. I think you can read at various levels though. When I say I've read most of Volumes 1-3, I mean literally that, I read the text through. At that level it isn't too difficult to read, and you'll learn a lot like that. However some bits I've studied in much greater detail, like for instance the multi-precision arithmetic algorithms which I had to implement. For that I read it mul…

the hard ones are unsolved research problems? I haven't read the book, so he poses research questions as exercises to the reader...?

He doesn't just spring them on the reader. Each exercise has a difficulty label. Level 50, IIRC, is for unsolved questions.

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

#45

Post by svat »

max_k wrote: post #34

This is certainly a matter of taste. I saw many prominent people everywhere praising TAOCP, but I was disappointed when I finally read the first three books some 10+ years ago. So much disappointed that I regret taking all the time to read it - not because they're bad books, but because I think that time would have been better spent learning things a different way. What bothered me most is MIX. I think using a very l…

When the books were written, the target audience would all be writing programs in (very different) machine languages, so the “mix” he created of existing computer architectures was a good one (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/18176). The specific MIX language is no longer similar to present-day machines (self-modifying code is out of style, for instance), which is why he came up with "MMIX" and there's a book (“The MMIX supplement” by Martin Ruckert, but carefully proofread by Knuth) with the MMIX equivalents of all the MIX programs.

But in any case the algorithms are taught in English not MIX; the MIX programs are only a very tiny part of the books (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14520230 — the 3000+ pages of Vols 1–4A have only 90 assembly programs), used only when the low-level details are actually relevant. So they can be skipped if one is not interested in them.

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

#46

Post by wiz21c »

if you use "sort" in your daily life, you don't need TAOCP. A good tutorial will do. If the "sort" provided by the libs you use doesn't work for you and you feel you need to taylor it to your needs, then start by TAOCP (an dbe sure to have time to do so, it's not an easy read when it comes to details).

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

#47

Post by al_be_back »

>> I'm starting the first volume

you've told us about your friend (hello there friend), but not said anything about your background / the context in which you're "starting". So...

It's generally aimed for those studying Computer Science and/or have deep interest in Theory of programming + computation.

Knuth loves algorithms, he even has algorithm on how to Read the book and approach the exercises (difficulty, mathematical complexity etc).

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

#48

Post by barrkel »

It's not usually useful, per se, unless you are able to refer to it during programming competitions, or if you're implementing a runtime library and want to brush up on the tradeoffs of some low level algorithms - but even then, the state of the art for e.g. sorting is outside the books.

I think the reader is improved for having read it, because it can open one's eyes to the fractal detail of solutions to coding problems.

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

#49

Post by DonHopkins »

dragonelite wrote: post #25

Does a christian needs to read the bible to a be christian not really. Same with TAOCP and programmers, but the more you read about CS the more complete of a programmer you become. For example i never thought i would use the basic compiler knowledge i gained during my bachelor. But at one of my first consulting gigs it did helped knowing about abstract syntax tree, where you can add and remove nodes. This knowledge h…

[flagged]

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

#50

Post by stylepoints »

svat wrote: post #30

A little bit of history about the book series may help understand what is in it. In 1956, Knuth graduated high school and entered college, where he encountered a computer for the first time (the IBM 650, to which the series of books is dedicated). He took to programming like a fish to water, and by the time he finished college in 1960, he was a legendary programmer, single-handedly writing several compilers on par wi…

So it's like the principia mathematica equivalent for computer programming
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