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Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

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Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#41

Post by the-printer »

kragen wrote: post #17
the-printer wrote: post #9

I am relatively unfamiliar with these books, but the fact that Knuth publishes them in “fascicles” is hilariously intriguing. I have a superficial understanding of Knuth’s character as a programmer but I get the impression that the work is portrayed in a folksy, arcane sort of way. Am I far off?

What's hilarious or intriguing about it? Is it just that you're not familiar with the practice of publishing things in fascicles?

Yes, actually, you are correct! Hilarious in the sense that I am amused; it makes me laugh; it brings me joy. Intriguing in that makes me want to read them. The years-long effort reminds me of Robert Caro’s series on Lyndon B. Johnson. It’s as if he’s been blogging for decades, but in book form.

Tantalizing.

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#42

Post by jsmith45 »

voakbasda wrote: post #24
coreyp_1 wrote: post #16

This is one of those book series that I really, really want to purchase as a beautiful, matching, leather-bound set. And, yes, I would read it for pleasure, and I would treasure it.

I was thinking the same thing when I clicked on the comments. I somewhat expect this will be the last volume in the series, so one could now hope to buy a "complete" set. I would love to revisit and explore all of the material using modern programming languages.

One might hope that he can at least complete 4C such that volume 4 is complete. I am skeptical that volume 5 or later will see the light of day, But I also cannot predict the future.

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#43

Post by noyesno »

coreyp_1 wrote: post #16

This is one of those book series that I really, really want to purchase as a beautiful, matching, leather-bound set. And, yes, I would read it for pleasure, and I would treasure it.

Bookbinding is a great hobby. Or you can commission someone to create leather-bound covers for your book?

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#44

Post by lifefeed »

Bayko wrote: post #2

Can someone honestly tell me if they have actually read these books AND found them useful ON TGE JOB? What do you guys do for work? I tried reading part 1?? Like ten years ago and it was pretty much assembly language or something I believe. And gave up since it wasnt something that I needed in academia back then and there were far better ways to learn DSA

Vol 1 is just an intro to math and his language, you don't really need it, but it's kinda fun.

I read some of Vol 2, Seminumerical Algorithms, to hone my instincts on how random numbers work in practice. I have referred to it on occasion when people say things like, "if we seed the random number generator, take the random number, then feed that into the seed, the result would be more random."

I read most of Vol 3, Sorting and Searching, when applying for jobs. It was more interesting than leetcode grinding. I don't know if it was more useful, but it was better for my sanity.

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#45

Post by jahewson »

giantg2 wrote: post #29
martincmartin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once used them at work. I had a monitor that was too low, so putting a volume or two of Knuth under it raised it to the right height. That's the only time I've ever used them though.

Quite expensive for that use.

And yet significantly cheaper than Apple's Pro Stand.

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#46

Post by linschn »

Bayko wrote: post #2

Can someone honestly tell me if they have actually read these books AND found them useful ON TGE JOB? What do you guys do for work? I tried reading part 1?? Like ten years ago and it was pretty much assembly language or something I believe. And gave up since it wasnt something that I needed in academia back then and there were far better ways to learn DSA

A colleague of mine had invented a technique for factoring composite numbers, that he thought would be quite fast.

I thought a little about it and saw that it would degenerate into sat solving.

I checked taocp and indeed my colleague's idea was in there. Also a faster algorithm was presented in the relevant section. I lended the book to him and we saved around a month of work.

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#47

Post by mkehrt »

Tomte wrote: post #36
bugfix-66 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been randomly skipping around inside these books for a long, long time. They're full of little gems that you won't find elsewhere. For example, in Volume 4A there's a simple technique for comparing two pointers in bit-reversed form. This technique was patented by Hewlett-Packard as a method of randomizing search trees (treaps): https://bugfix-66.com/fdb8bb4fa84cf810aa25ff40c88a13c1874410... From Volume 3, here i…

> However, if you look very carefully you can find mistakes. Opened the book, thought "no, it can't be". Agonized for days and weeks if I'm making a fool of myself. Sent the bug report. First word in first sentence in first paragraph in first chapter was wrong. Got my cheque. ;-)

What was it?!

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#48

Post by deltasepsilon »

Bayko wrote: post #2

Can someone honestly tell me if they have actually read these books AND found them useful ON TGE JOB? What do you guys do for work? I tried reading part 1?? Like ten years ago and it was pretty much assembly language or something I believe. And gave up since it wasnt something that I needed in academia back then and there were far better ways to learn DSA

It just means you're not doing anything interesting on your job.

If you have constraints, i.e. not enough compute, not enough memory, not enough storage, then you'll need a solution and, odds are, somebody has had the same problem before and it's been written up already in Knuth's TAOCP. Of course, the problem won't be exactly in the form it's been written up, but you have to have enough experience and knowledge to know the abstract form of your problem in order to figure out what parts of TAOCP would be useful to you.

Want a concrete example? Well, I'm in the generation that go to assume that storage was basically constant access regardless of whether you wanted to access the 1st byte, or the Nth one. New, high-performance memory like NAND flash, is weird because it's fundamentally unreliable. In order to make NAND reliable you have to do stuff, and some of the stuff you can do, makes NAND look like tape, and accessing tape is best done sequentially. Guess what TAOCP has? All these great ideas about maximizing random access to sequential media.

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#49

Post by kragen »

Tomte wrote: post #34
kragen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not be a coincidence that one of the author's other books is on Biblical studies: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/316.html I didn't realize it had been blurbed by a professor emeritus at a seminary (as well as Martin Gardner).

My take on it: https://www.2uo.de/Books/316-bible-texts-illuminated/

Interesting! A small correction: "innumerate" means "incapable of doing arithmetic"; perhaps you meant "innumerable", which means "incapable of being counted". Also you have "wuthor" for "author", "bible" for "Bible", "donÄt" for "don’t", "WHat" for "What", and "theologician" for "theologian".
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