Knuth's Art of Computer Programming Vol. 4

_mutators writes "bookpool.com has posted an excerpt from Knuth's long awaited The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 4. It is very short and discusses combinatorial searching. But when will it be published? Bookpool does not hazard a guess."

Comments

Dear Knuth

[Letter]

Dear Knuth,

After Vol. 4 are you going to do some "prequels?" So 1-4 are actually, say, 3-6, and then the new Vols. 1 and 2 include new special effects capable only in LaTeX2e?

Letter

I DO read them!

[nomadic]

How many people have bought the entire Knuth series just to occupy the moral high ground on their bookshelf?

That's absolute nonsense. I often will take one of his volumes off the bookshelf, put La Boheme on the stereo (the Pappano recording, of course) , pour myself a glass of Le Montrachet '78, and peruse Prof. Bluth's delightful words. You shouldn't be bitter just because you're too uncouth to understand them.

Re:You can already buy some of it

[antispam_ben]

And I'll bet Knuth doesn't slip nearly as bad as Longhorn.

Whichever's out first, I bet Knuth is a lot more stable.

The Childe Knuth

[iJames]

Man. At this rate, he's never going to get to the Dark Tower.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[jjoyce]

if he spent most of the time like a typical "hacker", drinking Mountain Dew and masturbating

Hey now, that was a pretty low blow. Many of us hate Mountain Dew.

Re:Many own, few read

[thogard]

The one exercise reducing a NP problem to a P problem has me stumped and I can't quite figure it out. Other than that, I've got most of them.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[adam31]

By my calculations, this method is approximately 2,522,880 times more efficient than Knuth's

Why are you getting so worked up about an improvement by only a constant factor?

Theoretically, the methods are equivalent... In fact, as the number of Knuth's books goes to infinity, the overhead of having to call the typesetters each time will overcome the one-time expense of writing the typesetting language.

Re:Additional information

[callipygian-showsyst]

This posting is a hoax! The real Don Knuth would have it in TeX format, not PostScript.

Steve Jobs has read them...

[deunhido]

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Professor Knuth," Steve said. "I've read all of your books."

"You're full of shit," Knuth responded.

From folklore.org

Re:Knuth isn't God..

[unknown_host]

Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Donald E. Knuth engage in a discussion on whose impact on Computer Science was the greatest.

Stallman: "God told me I have programmed the best editor in the world!"

Torvalds: "Well, God told *me* that I have programmed the best operating system in the world!"

Knuth: "Wait, wait - I never said that."

Photo of the cover!

[Admiral Burrito]

Here's a photo of the cover.

Re:Knuth isn't God..

[mountain_penguin]

while Dijkstra was still trying to find the shortest path to the conference

Re:Knuth isn't God..

[808140]

while Dijkstra was still trying to find the shortest path to the conference

Yes, apparently he was told just to go to the conference, but he considered that advice harmful.

Re:Apples to oranges.

[rssrss]

People have written whole books in Word and even swear by its facilities (e.g. indexing, outline view, etc)

Most of us swear at Word's facilities.