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Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#71

Post by srvmshr »

My advisor used to say:

"One of the CS bestsellers which is seldom read. That puts it right next to Bible"

From the practical element, mostly No. People won't use this as a first book - or the second or third. But if you wanted a reference on something deeper, which missed any of the standard textbooks, this is the book for you.

As an illustrative layman example, lets say you are modeling server usage with a mathematical model, most textbooks will tell you "hey, the pings and handshakes closely follow Poisson distribution". You pick from there and build on that information or mental model. But why Poisson model happens to be that way, why not something else - and how closely the server model cross-correlates will be realm of where TAOCP starts building the problem. It goes a layer or two deeper of yak shaving IMHO

Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#72

Post by DonHopkins »

aestetix wrote: post #62
DonHopkins wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You do know that Knuth is a devout Lutheran, right?

And that certainly doesn't mean the bible doesn't subjugate women and condone slavery and child murder (which you can easily verify by reading it yourself), it simply means he's steered clear of addressing those points (which is a pity).

His primary interest lies in the patterns, structures, and the mathematical beauty of the scriptures, rather than in theological or moral interpretations, which are still there and deeply influence and corrupt society, despite his ignoring them.

And that shows that expertise and rigor in one field doesn't necessarily translate into expertise and rigor in another field.

Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#73

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

Occasionally when I'm doing weird algorithmic stuff I end up with my nose in one of these books, combinatorial algorithms more often than many others.

I'm a big fan, but I think you already have to be pretty deep into the world of algorithms and discrete math to get a lot out of them. I cheated my way into that world by starting my math minor a few years ago with Combinatorics, specifically because I felt like learning how to count things in weird ways would help my autrocious mental math (it did!).

Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#74

Post by AeroNotix »

ralferoo wrote: post #70
gpderetta wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the great comment. It made me desire again to buy the books. But I know they will just sit on a shelf mostly unread.

I've wanted to buy these since the late 90s when I used to enjoy thinking about algorithms in the abstract, but never bought them because at the start of my career I felt quite poor and it didn't seem like a good use of my money. In 2015, I decided I was no longer poor and should buy the box-set as a treat. I set aside time to read a chapter in the first week after it arrived, but realised that it would take years to…

Wanna sell it?

Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#75

Post by cnity »

dmvdoug wrote: post #60
stylepoints wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's like the principia mathematica equivalent for computer programming

Principia was an attempt to derive math from logical ground up, motivated by ideas about the foundations of mathematics and logic (wrong ones, it turned out). Knuth is more like A Magical Mystery Tour of Algorithms, wherein Knuth is both tour guide and man behind the curtain.

My understanding of the flaws of PM is in its attempts to avoid self-reference, which was sort of folly from the beginning as proven by Godel. I learned this from I Am A Strange Loop, and I'm not sure how accurate it is historically. But Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is one of the most interesting things I've ever read about.

Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#76

Post by scrlk »

D. Richard Hipp used TACOP to implement a B-tree for SQLite:

> "Nobody ever taught me about a B-tree. I had heard of it. When I went to write my own B-tree, on the bookshelf behind me, I’ve got Don Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, so I just pulled that down, I flipped to the chapter on searching and looked up B-trees and he described the algorithm. That’s what I did. Funny thing, Don gives us details on the algorithm for searching a B-tree and for inserting into a B-tree. He does not provide an algorithm for deleting from the B-tree. That’s an exercise at the end of the chapter, so before I wrote my own B-tree I had to solve the exercise at the end. Thanks, Don. I really appreciate it."

https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/#b-tree...

Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#77

Post by MAXPOOL »

svat wrote: post #30

A little bit of history about the book series may help understand what is in it. In 1956, Knuth graduated high school and entered college, where he encountered a computer for the first time (the IBM 650, to which the series of books is dedicated). He took to programming like a fish to water, and by the time he finished college in 1960, he was a legendary programmer, single-handedly writing several compilers on par wi…

His first publication was "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures" for Mad Magazine in June 1967 when he was 19-years old.

https://silezukuk.tumblr.com/image/616657913

Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#78

Post by cschmidt »

djtango wrote: post #40
nickcw wrote: post #35

I've read most of Volumes 1-3 of TAOCP. I think you can read at various levels though. When I say I've read most of Volumes 1-3, I mean literally that, I read the text through. At that level it isn't too difficult to read, and you'll learn a lot like that. However some bits I've studied in much greater detail, like for instance the multi-precision arithmetic algorithms which I had to implement. For that I read it mul…

the hard ones are unsolved research problems? I haven't read the book, so he poses research questions as exercises to the reader...?

One level 50 problem was Exercise 1.2.6.63:

"Develop computer programs for simplifying sums that involve binomial coefficients"

Which was solved in the book titled "A = B":

https://www2.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/AeqB.html

or

https://www.amazon.com/B-Marko-Petkovsek/dp/1568810636

Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#79

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

scrlk wrote: post #76

D. Richard Hipp used TACOP to implement a B-tree for SQLite: > "Nobody ever taught me about a B-tree. I had heard of it. When I went to write my own B-tree, on the bookshelf behind me, I’ve got Don Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, so I just pulled that down, I flipped to the chapter on searching and looked up B-trees and he described the algorithm. That’s what I did. Funny thing, Don gives us details on the a…

Two of my favorite names in computer programming, working across time. Love to see it.

Re: Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?

#80

Post by gizajob »

cnity wrote: post #75
dmvdoug wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Principia was an attempt to derive math from logical ground up, motivated by ideas about the foundations of mathematics and logic (wrong ones, it turned out). Knuth is more like A Magical Mystery Tour of Algorithms, wherein Knuth is both tour guide and man behind the curtain.

My understanding of the flaws of PM is in its attempts to avoid self-reference, which was sort of folly from the beginning as proven by Godel. I learned this from I Am A Strange Loop, and I'm not sure how accurate it is historically. But Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is one of the most interesting things I've ever read about.

It wasn't a folly from the beginning because it seemed like it could be done when Russel and Whitehead started on the PM. It was only after it was published that Gödel proved it to have been a folly.
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