Slashdot Mirror
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."
The books homepage, http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.ht ml offers the fascicle for download for free. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc1.ps .gz You can still get $2.56 for each bug found, I believe.
~ knuth/taocp.html ~ knuth/fasc1.ps.gz
Mirrors:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
It's been a while. Dr. Knuth already finished pre-fascicle 4. Get it here. It's far from done (well, according to his plan).
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Error 500: Internal sig error
Nifty, but mainly from the whole CS angle. And it seems a bit more approachable that the third book was, although some of that has to do with the fact that I was relatively unschooled when I first read them.
It'll be a pleasure to add it to my bookshelf.
You can't defeat physics.
Check the left column of http://www.bookpool.com/.x/SSSSSS_C473S597521D0502 011740/ct/163. You can buy parts of Vol. 1 (revised) and 4 already, in addition to the one part that's ready for free download.
They also say they expect to be able to sell you the entire volume 4 in 2007. And I'll bet Knuth doesn't slip nearly as bad as Longhorn.
Sigs? Sigs? We don't need no steenkin' sigs.
Hopefully he finishes it before he finishes living.
All the best to the man, but seriously, dude, get on the ball. You don't have that many years left. If you can distill what's in your brain into book form, you will have done all of us a huge service.
Knuth made a suggestion that he would have vol 4 published in 2007. I wouldn't doubt his estimation if he wrote down a deadline for himself, and everyone else.
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Mathematics will always come back to hunt you down, in so many ways
I'm off to ask Addison-Wesley for a review copy of volume 4!
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Yes. You mean there's another Knuth?
I used to assume that Knuth simply acknowledged that CS had gotten too big to be summarized by a single introductory text. But it turns out that he's still working on it, even as the size of the project continues to grow. ("Volume 4" will actually be 4 volumes!) There's some weird obsession here, possibly characterized by Knuth's abandonment of email and certainly connected with his early retirement.
It's also strange that Knuth still insists providing code for a pseudo machine. I'm a CS flunkout, so my opinion isn't worth much, but this does seem to be a thoroughly obsolete idea. Especially when you consider how many effort Knuth expends redesigning the machine!
Knuth isn't God. His books aren't the Bible. He's just a computer science professor who wrote some books on the topic of algorithms.
Yes. And Einsteins wasn't God either. His books aren't the Bible. He was just a theoretical physics professor who wrote some books on the topic of relativity. Your point is?
After a while, you get a little more curious (or a bit stuck with counting things down to the last epsilon), so you go look at Knuth. Finally, if nothing else works, you sit down and prove it.
Personally, Knuth, Graham & Patashnik, and Hopcroft & Ullman have bailed me out more often than AoCP
Well, here's another reason he'd appear on Slashdot: he wrote TeX, which is even today the best free typesetting system. And it beats every commercial typesetting system for typesetting mathematics, which Microsoft, Adobe and others don't have a clue about after 20 years of research (indeed, most scientific publishers use TeX/LaTeX). You'll find it on your linux box: among other things, GNU TeXinfo uses it for printable manuals.
And yes, that's still the same Knuth -- he wrote TeX because he was unhappy with the publishers' typesetting of TAOCP.
You fail to mention you can download your book for free: http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/AsmTools/Gas/Programming GroundUp.pdf
use Lyx, very good quality output - as printout, PDF or HTML and easier to use than MS Word.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Word can handle more than a few pages?
But seriously, in the past I've been forced to write 40 and 50 page manuscripts (dense with equations) in Word. I recall spending more time debugging the bloody equation numbering than actually writing the prose.
MSW for technical text? Just say no.
The micropayment solutions is simple: They tend not get chached, usually. E.g., I have a few of them on my office wall... :-)
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
According to him, attributed grammars are his big discovery. And since I still see PhD's spawned by his original article, he may be right in that. But it may also be his contributions to early programming languages, or other papers. Hell, he authored literally hundreds of papers (himself, btw; he's not the person to put his name on papers where he wasn't involved in writing.) His scientific account is not centered on TACP, but on other research. You're repeating folklore here.
Of course, as you can read, I'm biased; having had the honor to work with him.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
"It's a Turing-complete language, you see, highly useful for people who want to solve the Halting Problem..."
As will be learned in an introductory course in computer science, a key property of the Halting Problem is that it cannot be solved by a language which is only Turing-complete (isomorphic to a Turing machine). There is thus a strong inclination to believe that you do not, in fact, know what the halting problem is and have just inserted a term which you have at some point heard used in conjunction with Turing machines into your essay in a failed attempt to impart a touch of intellectual sophistication. This calls the rest of the piece into question as well; how many times did you gamble on something you didn't understand an manage to produce a brief allusion which is not visibly incorrect?
"... results that look distinctly worse than if you'd used MS Word..."
If your assertion is that Times New Roman and Courier are better-looking than Computer Modern, you're putting yourself at odds with industry and academia alike. It's a noble attempt to take up the mantle of Gallileo, but you must remember than in order to be persecuted for being right one must first be right.
TeX is the best mathematical typesetting system available today, and is used for all major mathematical journals for this reason. As TeX is generally used to produce postscript output, it's quite easy to make use of any postscript font one wishes, but computer modern should really suffice in most cases.
"Like Schubert's Unfinished Symphony..."
The first movement of Shubert's unfinished symphony stands on its own, almost as a sort of program piece, and this is why the symphony is so popular. Nobody expects a third movement, and indeed very few particularly care for the second.
Having shown a complete lack of the most basic knowledge in relation to mathematics, computers, music, literature, and several other areas of knowledge, you should strongly consider returning to school and completing your high school degree in order to help you form coherent, relevant essays if you wish to further pursue book criticism.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
I used to work for bookpool (4 or so months ago). They're a great group of people dedicated to serving the customer. Little known fact: They are on the Island of Martha's Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts!
Their prices are usually the best around, and they ship things out quick. So after the slashdotting, be sure to check them out for tech books.
I'm curious... how many people had heard of them before today?