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Volume 4A of Knuth's TAOCP Finally In Print
jantangring writes "It's been 28 years since Volume 3 of Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming was published. The book series is a classic work of computer science in spite of the fact that still more than half of the seven volume series is still to be finalized. In 1992 Donald Knuth retired to medieval monkness in order to finish his work. After many long years in draft, volume 4A now in print and you can get it in a boxed set if you don't mind admitting that you don't already own the first three volumes. They won't be checking if you read it."
I just want to point out that these books are called "The Art of Computer Programming" and not:
The Art of Software Engineering.
The Art of Computer Science
or The Art of [insert some pretentious title]
And even without and pretentious term for what it is, it is still taken quite seriously and nobody disparages it.
You don't have to be called an engineer or scientist to be taken seriously.
It's a new feature. You buy the book, read it, and then sell it on ebay or amazon as "like new/mint" condition to recoup ~90% of your money. --- or --- If you like the book you can keep it forever without having to fear someone will delete it from your kindle. You can even pass it on to your children! Personally I think this is an improvement.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
But more seriously - it would make far more sense to buy this as an e-book that I can search on my computer wherever I am.
I do enough of my programming from home or from a coffee shop that it'd be rather useless to have these things stuck on my office bookshelf (except, perhaps to look a bit pretentious).
The answer is that if that was done, then the next version, 3.14159265, would have a lower number. The whole point of the irrational number thing is that it's still technically increasing—thus the truncation.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!