141–150 of 357 posts
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.
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
I'm currently going through Fascicule 6A dedicated to SAT solving and I can tell you it is by far the best reference. I haven't found anywhere else a complete reference that builds a SAT solver from scratch while explaining why each technique is used. Regarding more classical algorithms, I never bothered reading the other fascicles. I think there are much more practical references but none is as complete and detailed…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, despite everyone's claims of how "beautiful" the books are, I think they are rather terribly formatted. For example, the first volume consists of 2 "chapters". Each chapter spans about 250 pages on its own. So actually not a chapter, but a section, or maybe even a book in its own right. Then, each chapter is broken into sections and subsections that flow one into the next. There's a fundamental lack of whit…
You read a math book slowly, so you don't need whitespace for help skimming. Extra whitespace would make the huge books even huger. Beautiful formatting here refers to the text , not the whitespace.
I don't find the text in any other book I own to be insufficient, or even noticeably that different from Knuth's books (with the obvious exception of some fly-by-night print-on-demand stuff purchased off Amazon in recent years). It's an assertion in want of proof. TeX might be the greatest example of Yak Shaving in human history: Knuth spent at least 30 years between Volumes 3 and 4 to work on TeX because of dissatisfaction with layout in V3.
This is what I'm talking about. Notice the use of colored blocks and whitespace to break up the flow of the page, to callout different asides and section headers.
https://twitter.com/Sean_McBeth/status/1577388169418383363
Adding whitespace doesn't have to make the book longer. It could just make the book wider. Besides, paper is cheap.
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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 k…
Serious question - why wouldn’t you search for the algorithm you need (or the problem statement) on Google scholar these days? I have the books but if I ever found myself reaching for them at work, I would consult most recent literature
Of course other resources exist, many of which cite TAOCP or are derived from it
In Google’s recent “Hacking Google” series [1] they appeared to credit Knuth via his bug reward program in his books [2] as having created the first software bug bounty offer. Anyone aware of any software bug bounties that predate Knuth’s? ___________ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33066313 - specifically: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IoXiXlCNoXg&list=PL590L5WQmH8dsx... [2] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_r…
From your wiki link:
Initially, Knuth sent real, negotiable checks to recipients. He stopped doing
so in October 2008 because of problems with check fraud. As a replacement, he
started his own "Bank of San Serriffe", in the fictional nation of
San Serriffe, which keeps an account for everyone who found an error since
2006.[2] Knuth now sends out "hexadecimal certificates" instead of negotiable
checks.Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not the only one. If we're honest most of us buy the series as a mark of status / pride, not out of any plan to actually read it. I mean yeah I do plan to. Probably once I've retired. But that's a long way away :-)
I use it more like a dictionary. I don't read it from start to finish, but if I need an algorithm for something, I look it up in Knuth.
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
Over 25 years ago I was researching algorithms for a search engine I had been commissioned to write, and for its disk allocation strategy I had settled on a "buddy algorithm" from The Art of Computer Programming Vol 1. It had nice properties and was easy to make. I implemented it to a tee, only to see it fail (I think in the part that merges abandoned blocks). I banged my head against this problem for days before fin…
(Adapted from Feynman, who apologized for errors in his Lectures, but refused to accept blame for anyone who cited them in a dispute. The truth speaks for itself.)
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.
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
I don't own any of them, but sometimes get them from the library for interview prep. Totally over the top for that, but sometimes inbetween googling and overcomplicated other books it's a nice relief to read through these lines, into which very obviously a lot of thought has gone. The opposite of all the fast-lived crap we have to deal with on a daily basis, and therefore also useful for the job. Motivating, I would…
He also seems like the kind of guy you'd want to have a cup of coffee or tea with. Always seemed like a fun and sweet guy in the interviews I've seen with him.