161–170 of 357 posts
Very cool. I own the originals and the 4th but sadly I have to admit that even though I am a reasonably accomplished developer with a couple of CS degrees I have a hard time understanding this work and have not yet really read it. I feel like I am publicly admitting failure just posting this. I still have time to make sure these are not just bookshelf decorations though.
There's something beautiful about his work on the series. He's been working on it for years, built TeX (not sure if that was for this series or other books of his), and has such ambitious plans. He's a serious legend in the field of computer science and we're lucky to have someone like him to have provided our industry with so much incredible knowledge. I'm interested to see how the series progresses for the next 30…
Donald is 84. And each time I’m reminded of that I get sad, it’s very unlikely we’ll get another 30 years of his work.
There's something beautiful about his work on the series. He's been working on it for years, built TeX (not sure if that was for this series or other books of his), and has such ambitious plans. He's a serious legend in the field of computer science and we're lucky to have someone like him to have provided our industry with so much incredible knowledge. I'm interested to see how the series progresses for the next 30…
It looks like he started working on it in 1962.
Just imagine being that intelligent and pouring 60 years of your life into something like this.
There's something beautiful about his work on the series. He's been working on it for years, built TeX (not sure if that was for this series or other books of his), and has such ambitious plans. He's a serious legend in the field of computer science and we're lucky to have someone like him to have provided our industry with so much incredible knowledge. I'm interested to see how the series progresses for the next 30…
> I'm interested to see how the series progresses for the next 30 years. Donald is 84. And each time I’m reminded of that I get sad, it’s very unlikely we’ll get another 30 years of his work.
There's something beautiful about his work on the series. He's been working on it for years, built TeX (not sure if that was for this series or other books of his), and has such ambitious plans. He's a serious legend in the field of computer science and we're lucky to have someone like him to have provided our industry with so much incredible knowledge. I'm interested to see how the series progresses for the next 30…
> I'm interested to see how the series progresses for the next 30 years. Donald is 84. And each time I’m reminded of that I get sad, it’s very unlikely we’ll get another 30 years of his work.
Very cool. I own the originals and the 4th but sadly I have to admit that even though I am a reasonably accomplished developer with a couple of CS degrees I have a hard time understanding this work and have not yet really read it. I feel like I am publicly admitting failure just posting this. I still have time to make sure these are not just bookshelf decorations though.
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…
But regarding your complaint about formatting, note that the book design of the TAOCP volumes is not Knuth's doing: someone at Addison-Wesley came up with them in the mid-1960s, and the first three volumes were published with Monotype (hot-metal) typesetting. When Knuth wrote TeX in the late 70s/early 80s, his goal was simply to retain the style of the books. (The layout was fine; the publishers were trying to move to phototypesetting and the fonts were poor https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/367058, so he needed digital fonts and wrote METAFONT to create them, and he needed TeX just to be able to use those fonts.) Perhaps the book Concrete Mathematics will be a better example for you to critique, as Knuth had more of a hand in its typesetting (though there too a book designer was involved; the article Typesetting Concrete Mathematics has some details, reprinted in the Digital Typography volume and a poor scan of its earlier publication here: https://tug.org/tugboat/tb10-1/tb23knut.pdf).
About chapter length: the initial table of contents was one book of 12 chapters; Knuth wildly underestimated the printed length of what he had written (not many people know he actually wrote the whole book, all 12 chapters, in the 1960s, amounting to about 3500 pages — since then you can say he's been updating the chapters and publishing each section when he thinks it's ready), so the plan changed to seven volumes with the same chapters. And the chapter sections' lengths have themselves grown with the growth of the subject; as you can see, the current volume 4B is just a tiny fraction of the projected Chapter 7: covers 7.2.2.1 and 7.2.2.2.
Also, about the flowchart for how to read the books: it's partly a joke about flowcharts, but the suggested reading order is very much linear: https://i.stack.imgur.com/UCsOx.png — in words, it's just something like "read the chapters in order, skipping starred sections on the first reading. Also, feel free to skip boring sections, and skim math when it gets difficult" (he addresses the mathematics in the preface on p. viii).
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 worked as an OS Architect at IBM and then Chief Scientist at a very successful startup. Subjects like analysis of algorithms, memory management, optimizing disk access, search tries, random number generation, and many more found in TAOCP have all been useful in my professional life. I've had to give many technical presentations and to present my designs to committees of experts and CS professors. Knuth wasn't the only source of my preparation for this kind of work, but he was a very important source.
Are there better books on algorithms? Maybe. I also like the popular Introduction to Algorithms [1], Sedgwick's Algorithms [2], and Skeina's Algorithm Design Manual [3]. All of these are good and all of them sit on the shelf right next to Knuth's books. Depending on the subject, any one of these might have the best treatment. BTW, Sedgwick was a Ph.D. student of Knuth.
To keep up with the literature I also recommend a membership in the ACM with access to their digital library.
[1] Thomas H. Cormen , Charles E. Leiserson, et al. (2022), Introduction to algorithms, MIT Press.
[2] Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne, (2011), Algorithms, Addison-Wesley.
[3] Steven S. Skiena, (1997), The algorithm design manual, Springer.
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
