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."

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Additional information

[HyperChicken]

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.

Mirrors:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/~ knuth/taocp.html
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/~ knuth/fasc1.ps.gz

It's been a while.

[robbyjo]

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).

Many own, few read

[Ars-Fartsica]

How many people have bought the entire Knuth series just to occupy the moral high ground on their bookshelf? For my money, Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest's "Introduction to Algorithms" is preferred for almost all related material you might want to investigate.

Re:Many own, few read

[cecom]

While I was growing up in Eastern Europe, it was completely impossible to find any of the volumes. They weren't available for sale and almost all copies had been stolen from the libraries (well, not exactly "stolen" but many people forgot to return the book and would much prefer to pay the library fine).

I eventually managed to get a hold of "Searching and Sorting" for a couple of days and I tried to read it. Needless to say, I didn't get far. One needs months to consume the whole thiing :-)

When I moved to the US, the first thing I did was to buy the series. I couldn't believe that it was actually available in stores! I have to admit though, I still haven't read the three volumes completely - ah, I miss the enthusiasm of my youth.

Didn't somebody say that one should never attempt to read the whole thing ? One should turn to a specific section and read it only when the need arises. That makes me feel better :-)

Re:Many own, few read

[CEHT]

Reading all volumes is one thing. Try reading them and finish all the exercises is another.

Still Waiting

[Detritus]

When I bought Volume 3, about 20 years ago, it included a postcard that the buyer could mail to the publisher, to be added to a mailing list for notification when Volume 4 was published. I sent in the postcard.

I'm still waiting.

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:Nifty from the Knuth

[HyperChicken]

Adding it to your bookshelf does no good: You have to read it.

The Childe Knuth

[iJames]

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

Re:Question

[rsidd]

Well, there's been cases of repeated last names in science... I just never thought that a person both prominent and low-profile (who in here has studied information theory and text searching algorithms?) would appear on a popular site such as /.

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.

There's a fun bit in

[multiplexo]

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross where one of the characters reveals that the reason why Knuth hasn't released volume 4 is that it contains a hack that allows you to solve non-deterministic polynomial (NP) problems in polynomial time. This is such a huge secret that the world's intelligence agencies, who already know how to do this, have an agreement with Professor Knuth where as long as he doesn't publish volume 4 they won't render him metabolically challenged (i.e, "dead".

The Atrocity Archives is a way cool book, I heartily recommend it to /. geeks. Stross used to work as a programmer/sysadmin so it's a lot of fun if you've ever worked in IT.

Eh, mediocre at best.

[Grendel Drago]

Oh, come on. Adequacy has produced some good trolls (though I can't remember any from the top of my head), but this... is just sloppy.

like, for example, page numbering starting on a number other than 1

\pageno=10

I didn't know how to do that. I googled for it. No nine megabytes of C code involved. And a real troll would have seized on TeX being written in WEB, the Pascal-like "literate programming" language that Knuth designed himself. A real troll would have further complained that most hacking is really done using TeX's own macro system, which can be weird and baroque a lot of the time.

And how did "Knuth" become "Bluth" halfway through? If it's a joke about the Mormon animator, follow it through.

And dear god, man, there may be better ways of separating content and presentation---standards-compliant HTML with CSS, anyone?---but MS Word is not it. I've seen documents that have gone through many hands, serious works that involve difficult formatting... and it ain't pretty. Word is simply not a serious typesetting tool. Talk about InDesign or QuarkXPress if you want to go on about that.

LaTeX also allows the use of standard PostScript fonts with a quick

\usepackage{times}

in the preamble, but I kinda like the cm fonts myself.

Also, I'm not sure where the complaints about needing to edit incomprehensible jargon to correct typos came from. Text is represented as... plain old text. When is it any other way? Math is hard to read if it's badly written or you're not used to it, but it's no worse than it has to be, to my eyes.

Is it a sign of the incredible good design of TeX that the Adequacy people couldn't find very many real flaws to harp on? Or does Adequacy simply suck ass? I fear it to be the latter; I have plenty of nits to pick with TeX, but this reads like it was written by someone who heard of TeX once, and decided to write a rant about it. Frickin' weak.

--grendel drago

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."

Re:Apples to oranges.

[HuguesT]

You really want to compare Word and (La)TeX, they are both document preparation systems that provide you with outlines, tables, figures, indexes, tables of content, equations and general typesetting facilities (styles, fonts, etc).

MS-Word is the archetypal "WYSIWYG" typesetting system, with all of its seemingly low-barrier-of-entry appeal. It is completely state of the art. The limitations of word are not so much due to the model (what you see is *only* what you get) than the implementation.

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

In contrast TeX is more of a "what you mean is what you get" system. It enforces the rules of the Chicago Book of Style for you in a relatively straighforward manner. You enter the data structure of the document, it produces something up to publishing standards immediately. It is incredibly productive but not of obvious usage to anyone. In TeX to produce a document you have to find an editor, a command line and invoke the TeX compiler (yes I do know about things like LyX, TeXShop and the like, they are but a crutch to the TeX afficionado, although they might lower the barrier of entry somewhat).

In Word you just type away. You *will* make stylistic mistakes that TeX would not allow you to get away with, but it does look easier at first glance, and even long-time TeX users have to fight with the system to sometime get the result they would like to see (like "put that damn figure on *this* page, not the other page, dammit!") although what TeX does is usually the correct,proper way.

No prize for deciding which is the eventual winner however, except in the category of "ease of use for single-page, no frills documents", and even then...

TeX is not meant for desktop publishing though. You would not be able to put together a glossy magazine in TeX without considerable efforts, and so doesn't really compare with Quark or Indesign.

For DTP the free alternative is Scribus.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[daniel_mcl]

"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.