21–30 of 141 posts
I keep volumes 1 and 2 on my desk in case I ever need to refer to them for information about a specific topic, but I have yet to actually open them.
> based on its stellar reputation as one of the indispensible, foundational computer science books that every programmer should read. A while back, I was joking with some friends that TAoCP is to the programming world what Finnegans Wake is to English literature: you're not supposed to read it, nobody's ever actually read it. We all just say we've read it, talk about how brilliant it is, and place it prominently on o…
Especially without those math courses, I imagine it will be a tougher read, certainly for those grown up with multi-mega or multi-gigabyte machines who expect it to be on programming, not computer science.
And it isn't 60's era formalism, it is low-level computer science.
> based on its stellar reputation as one of the indispensible, foundational computer science books that every programmer should read. A while back, I was joking with some friends that TAoCP is to the programming world what Finnegans Wake is to English literature: you're not supposed to read it, nobody's ever actually read it. We all just say we've read it, talk about how brilliant it is, and place it prominently on o…
If you're in the Toronto region, I actually run a reading group for these books: http://www.meetup.com/Knuth-Reading-Group-Art-of-Computer-Pr.... We get together about once a month and go through the problems together. Just last night we had a 2.5-hour session about only section 2.3.4.1. I doubt you'd be able to get this much content from a sub-sub-sub-section of CLRS.
> based on its stellar reputation as one of the indispensible, foundational computer science books that every programmer should read. A while back, I was joking with some friends that TAoCP is to the programming world what Finnegans Wake is to English literature: you're not supposed to read it, nobody's ever actually read it. We all just say we've read it, talk about how brilliant it is, and place it prominently on o…
I read (and understood) volumes 1 to 3 (text, exercises and answers to the exercises, insofar they are present). It is not that hard to read, if you combine it with the right set of university courses in discrete math, combinatorics, and number theory, and some hacking on a 80's home computer (teaches one assembler) Especially without those math courses, I imagine it will be a tougher read, certainly for those grown…
> based on its stellar reputation as one of the indispensible, foundational computer science books that every programmer should read. A while back, I was joking with some friends that TAoCP is to the programming world what Finnegans Wake is to English literature: you're not supposed to read it, nobody's ever actually read it. We all just say we've read it, talk about how brilliant it is, and place it prominently on o…
And this shows a huge folly in our industry. Short answer, is the book easy? Of course not. Is it dated in approach? Yes. Sorta. What would make it better? A modern language? Why? Consider, just yesterday there was someone designing an elevator system using python. That is literally one of the first examples in TAoCP. Not long ago, there was an article about how linear search with sentinel values is actually faster t…
Perhaps it's sacrilege, but I've always considered it kind of weird to take on a project like TAOCP in a field that's growing far faster than it can be documented by one person.
pipeline stalls, designing for cache performance, branch prediction, multithreading, etc. Those are issues for a subset of computer hardware. Embedded computing is still huge and has drastically different performance requirements. TAOCP is designed to stand the test of time, not focus on micro-optimizations that generally have limited performance impact and are a waste of time 99% of the time.
Even chips as small Cortex-M4 has a write buffer, 3-stage pipeline and branch speculation. And real embedded computing is more and more utilizing hardware similar to desktop/mobile/server. You can't run self-driving car / neural networks / image processing on a single threaded CPU with no cache or branch prediction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this shows a huge folly in our industry. Short answer, is the book easy? Of course not. Is it dated in approach? Yes. Sorta. What would make it better? A modern language? Why? Consider, just yesterday there was someone designing an elevator system using python. That is literally one of the first examples in TAoCP. Not long ago, there was an article about how linear search with sentinel values is actually faster t…
> But, there is a lot to offer in the industry of programming. Knuth picked an order to offer this information and is going in that order. Perhaps it's sacrilege, but I've always considered it kind of weird to take on a project like TAOCP in a field that's growing far faster than it can be documented by one person.