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

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

#351

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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…

>It just means you're not doing anything interesting on your job. That man had a family...

had

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

#353
post #338
post #265

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Wow, thank you for this great answer! It makes me wonder though why previous published mathematics about computer programming has been allegedly faulty. Since I don't know enough math to objectively see whether Knuth has succeeded in his task or not... TAOCP could have benefited a lot if someone had written a simpler on-ramping version, with examples in a powerful but newbie-friendly industrial-grade language, such a…

Knuth wrote that preface in the early 1960s, when it was indeed true that much of what little there was of published mathematical study related to programming was faulty. He succeeded incredibly well: he kickstarted the entire field of "analysis of algorithms", got all the details right and organized them extremely clearly, put it on a sound footing, and now mathematicians take it seriously, and published work in the…

Thank you very much, for educating me.

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

#355
post #132

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If you’re interested in reading them (and they are extremely readable), you should first know something (not everything) about programming and discrete mathematics. If you watched some YouTube videos on logic, sets, graphs, etc. you’ll be more than equipped. Knuth has even written a book, Concrete Mathematics, that covers these pre-requisites but it might be faster and easier to watch a Khan Academy video!

That's not really what Concrete Mathematics is about. It's not a prereq to TAOCP.

Concrete Mathematics is in fact an elaboration on the chapter covering the prereq in TAOCP. It was well worth it considering how great this chapter is.

The best part of TAOCP for me is how incredibly good the exercises are. The gradual difficulty is perfect and from 20 onwards you always get some interring insight from solving them. I am especially M and HM ones which are amongst some of the best maths problems I have seen despite being in a CS book.

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

#356

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I feel this in my soul. My work uses Mac and I'm not used to it. Fn and cmd keys block my reach for alt and control in my vim sessions and make it awkward to go through tabs in the browser with the keyboard.

Why not just use an external keyboard? I had the opposite problem until I bought a Magic Keyboard to use at work.

Fun fact : I have an external keyboard, but it's an MS one, so there is no more drivers, and some keys just won't work (or at least I haven't yet found anyway to remap things.)

Shrug, I guess ?

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

#357
post #50

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And more prestigious to boot.

My laptop is raised to the height of my other monitors by Feynman's boxed set of Lectures on Physics, Aho & Ullman's Foundations of Computer Science, and a Scott Adams compendium. This way my computing is based on a strong foundation...

LoL :) we should have a __how you boost your monitor to the right height thread __ I use Mckusik's freebsd book, Brooks computer architecture, Myth and meaning by Levi-Strauss. The last one is for calibration only.
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