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Knuth's Fascicle 3b Available
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Knuth is making progress on volume 4 of The Art of Computer Programming. Another fascicle is available. More news here."
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I hope you're joking.
Have you tried reading TAoCP? This is not some computer book but is an in-depth study of all the mathematics that Computer Science comprises. Some of the exercies would serve as topics for a PhD thesis (and are marked as such).
Suffice it to say that writing these books is not an easy task and I'm not sure if the series will ever get finished. I'm still on the first volume, so I don't know if I'll ever finish the series. Even though wikipedia shows us that a community effort can produce some good writing, I doubt it could ever produce something as in-depth as TAoCP.
And besides this, I think Addison-Wesley would have something to say about putting TAoCP in public domain.
Probably that's supposed to be funny, but for those who don't understand the context of the joke, Dr. Knuth is running behind (didn't I just write this up recently?) because
1 - the work itself is huge (when first asked to write it he delivered some six or seven _hundred_ pages of manuscript as the first _chapter_, causing his editor to ask, ``Don, just how long is this book going to be?''
2 - publishing switched from hot metal type set by a combination of casting machines and hand-work for mathematics typography to phototypesetters and after digital typesetters. Because of the limitations of the early typesetting systems, Dr. Knuth saw it as his obligation to set aside everything else and write a publishing / typesetting system for mathematics --- he thought it would be done over his sabbatical of that year, some decades later he announced TeX complete and frozen at version 3 (w/ a version number tending toward pi and a several hundred dollar reward for finding a bug).
Lest you think TeX is irrelevant in these graphical days, TeXinfo is the basis for the GNU documentation format, an awful lot of XML gets typeset programmatically by TeX (look up xmltex for one example), Adobe uses TeX's H&J as the basis for the ``multi-line composer'' in their InDesign page layout application (by way of URW's HZ), and there're wonderful new formats such as ConTeXt and documentclasses such as KomaScript and Memoir _and_ w/ the new edition of _The LaTeX Companion_ soon to be published, work on LaTeX3 should accelerate.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
It's worth noting that a number of Dr. Knuth's books are available insofar as is possible --- look for _The TeXbook_ and _The METAFONTbook_ in particular, also his _Mathematical Writing_, and of course, one can typeset the (Literate Programming) source of tex.web to essentially get the book _TeX: The Program_ (only up-dated ;)
Dr. Knuth has also published some _way_ cool commentary on programs as literate commentary on them, esp. look for his coverage of _The Colossal Cave Adventure_
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I forgot to mention that when I submitted the article.
It also seems that pre-fascicle 2c has been renamed to pre-fascicle 3a.
Seeing that pre-fascicles 2a and 2b total 138 pages and that 3a and 3b total 156 pages, perhaps the "real" fascicles 2 and 3 will shortly arrive (unless fascicle 1 has to be completed first).
By the way, I'd start looking for errors in pre-fascicle 3c, the $2.56 reward applies to pre-fascicles as well. (I got a check from Knuth for one in one of the previous ones -- quite an amazing thing to get one of those famous checks!)