51–60 of 192 posts
One suggestion: if the mathematical preliminary section in Volume 1 of TAOCP is too difficult, you might benefit from the textbook Concrete Mathematics by Graham, Knuth, and Patashnik. Concrete Mathematics is essentially a gentler (but still rigorous) introduction to the mathematical concepts covered in the first volume of TAOCP.
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…
Keep them in the bathroom and open them at random at idle moments. Like the Bible or a "Complete Shakespeare" there's something worth your time on almost any page you pick.
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…
Your comments put TAOCP in a historical context. Yes, for the time, TAOCP was a huge achievement and it is a magnificient work. History is interesting, but the question here is about today, and I don't think it's the best way to learn the stuff today. (Again, just my opinion, there's no right and no wrong here.)
Personally, I think the TeX (that Knuth designed because he could not typeset the TAOCP to his liking) is a much more valuable side effect of Knuth writing the TAOCP than the books themselves, but this is not a popular opinion, at least within my Stanford-educated friends.
I've read SICP - loved it until it got into the later object orientation parts - so I'm wondering in if you LOVED X IS Y FOR YOU sort of comparison - What books if you liked will you like TAOCP If you hated skip TAOCP. Me: Loved SICP totally wore out Godel, Escher, Bach Somewhat angry at A New Kind of Science
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…
I thought the books where a kind of reference material, rather than a guided study.
It's a guided study, but because doing the guided study is daunting and would take years, in practice many people (among those who read it at all) tend to use it as a reference, dipping in to specific topics here and there.
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…
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