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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."
Who else hasn't read his copy of volume three?
Kriston
I got the first 3 as a boxed set many years ago, so.....
"His name was James Damore."
What is that strange substance these books are packaged in? Some kind of plant-fiber derivative? Weird.
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.
From Vol 1: "However, it must be admitted that MIX is now quite obsolete. Therefore MIX will be replaced in subsequent editions of this book by a new machine called MMIX, the 2009.
I take it Vol 4A is still MIX with 6-bit bytes?
Am I right my assumption that there may be as many as 8 volumes of Volume 4?
Cultist of the Average Middle-Aged Ones
Volume 3 is my most used one. I pretty much devoured it when I was doing research on databases and practical optimization of sort/search algorithms. I bought the first 3 volumes pretty much when they were all first available, back in 1983 near the beginning of my software engineering career in the Silicon Valley.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Right now, tex (written by Knuth) is at version number 3.141592.
Following the same pattern, we may get a boxed library of programming books from Knuth without ever reaching volume 5.
Given the $$$ for the boxed set, which was way more than a poor college/post college programmer could afford, I promised myself I'd get these books when volume 4 came out. Over the years I've read through and copied, a lot of times by hand, his algorithms while sitting at B&N or someplace, and I always would finish by saying "Why don't I just buy this and save me the trouble?" Then suddenly everything was on the internet, and I could refer back to my notes, and then I didn't need to look at my notes any longer, but I kept wanting to buy the books, if anything to show gratitude. Now that the 4th is out, I'm going to do it.
Donald Knuth has published a book and a date has been set for the release of Duke Nukem Forever? It's all too much.
Don't forget to add: stack_size = 100000000000 to /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf.cnf !
Get off my lawn!
I believe he used to be some kind of sweet little cuddly polar bear that got quite a bit of attention, and though he's all grown up now I don't think any of them have written books before, so it's a big deal.
I thought that Knuth had a deal with a mysterious British intelligence agency that as long as he didn't publish volume four they would let him remain metabolically active. I hope he doesn't have some illness that made their threats moot.
The 3 first volumes of "The art of computer programming" were for many years the de-facto reference for learning about data structures and algorithms using a rigorous approach.
The problems given at the end of each chapter are comprehensive and often very difficult, which make the series challenging and particularly interesting.
Today there are much better textbooks if you simply want to learn about algorithms. The TAOCP series demonstrates implementations using MIX, a made-up assembly language which is quite frankly, horrible. However, this doesn't change the fact that the series was a huge contribution to the field, and still has its merits.
I had to check to see if you were kidding! And actually:
ali@katamari:~$ tex --version
TeX 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
which is totally what she said
When you consider that the copyright date in my copies of V1 & V2 are 1968,72 and 1968,73, and 1980 for V3, it is amazing that these books are still of use.
It is hardly surprising that MIX is a little "odd" by the standards of today - it would be like comparing Mercury autocode with C#
... for the spoken book edition.
I'm preordaining this so I can have a chance at finding a mistake and getting a reward check.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Pretty hot to see this bump for the old Alma Mater:
check the fine print at the bottom:
http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2010/10/28-6621_Computer-Scientists-Make-Progress-on-Math-Puzzle_article.html
Knuth takes forever to get the first 4 volumes out, making you wonder if he'll ever finish the whole thing. Then he will get the final three volumes out in rapid succession, but they will largely be regarded as huge disappointments by the rest of the programming community. For the most part, those last three volumes will just reference prior work Knuth has done, and talk a lot about recursion.
If my post were a car, this sig would be its bumper-sticker.
You can always identify people whom have never read Knuth because they get hung up on it not using the hot new language of the month. "Now with Erlang!"
On the other hand, the people that "read" Knuth but didn't understand any of it, get even by complaining about the magnetic tape merge scenarios, and "doesn't everyone just use the qsort routine anyway?"
The folks whom "get it" understand its not training, but education.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Volume 3 was first published in 1973. That is 38 years ago. Also, the first (incomplete) paperback edition of volume 4 was published in 2005. In 2011, volume 4 is still not complete. Wtf 28 years? Please don't post again until the whole series is complete.
assignment != equality != identity
I had trouble following your post because every reading of one of your flagrant misuses of "whom" resulted in a cascade of aneurysms. These caused me to pause and foam at the mouth a little bit. I later regained consciousness and was able to continue reading. And then bam, another misuse of "whom"! I don't know if I will ever recover.
He needs to buck up and get a move on. He was born in 1938, at this rate he'll be long dead before he finishes...
IANAProgrammer, but I have done sufficiently erudite activities to be qualified to post something.
Coffee Shops / Bars / Restaurants are crossover categories.
When you want to do stuff in one of these locations, you search out a conducive establishment. In my modestly tourist-rural area, there may be about 10 promising locations in a 50 mile area.
It's all about the mood - find a place that isn't counting Tables Per Night or Upsell Hell. No, don't leave your laptop and papers on the table for a rest visit, - just sleep your laptop and shove the papers in your carrycase and just leave your DRINK on the table to mark your spot.
Posting AC
Part 1 was the best. Reloaded & Revolutions were OK. I hope 4A is better.
The final "its" is what caused the stroke though.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Yes, he does intend to finish.
You have to understand that when he was first asked to write this ``book'' he wrote out longhand ~600 pages and submitted that as the first chapter --- when his editor received this manuscript he asked in response, ``Don, just how long is this book going to be?'' --- after a bit of back-and-forth they worked out that the first submission would be the bulk of Vol. 1 and planned out the balance of the volumes. Then the Monotype casting machines were retired and he took a bit of time off to write TeX (see his book _Digital Typography_ for the full story).
TeX was declared finished in 1982 and since then he's caught up on bug reports for his other books &c.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I have no problem leaving my laptop on the table for a few minutes in a reasonably full coffee shop. Who's going to steal a laptop in full view of 25 people? I have enough faith in humanity that someone would say something when a person came along and tried to grab a computer that wasn't theirs. I'd certainly do so. I might even try a tackle. Do you think that every one of those people is a member of a laptop-stealing ring? A new twist on the con-man's "store"? Coffee shop as a front: suckers come in, get some coffee, and get their laptop ganked?
Knuths' books used to be the dope, now they're more like the antidote. Most code monkeys these days are consumed by hacking their way through the jungle overgrowth and not losing sight of the sky (33 million lines of code in Helios). We've become so engaged by the canopy, we actually forget the soil has worms. There are times when it would be useful to regain this awareness.
As fascinating as the worms are, most code monkeys have poor digestive capacity for worms. Those of us who are ecologists rather than arborists can extract a fair amount of value from these volumes. And then we can argue among ourselves who maintains the 10,000 lines of code in Helios where adjusting the nitrogen level makes much of a difference.
BTW, I recommend his paper on Dancing Links for exact cover, even if the technique is less general than I hoped, it's still clever. On that note, Knuth couldn't code an extension point to save his life. He's the grand master of clock-work monoliths.
You now have 4 data points, so can someone draw a plot to see when the next volume is coming out?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
I'd ask if this guy is a native English speaker, but his wikipedia page says he's originally from Milwaukee, WI.
Now, I've heard of both:
Being on top of things
and
Getting to the bottom of thigns
but I've never heard of someone wanting to "be on the bottom of things." This image conjures up pictures either suitable for prison life or a procrastinator's paradise; possibly both
Shouldn't that be rounded up to 3.1415927?
Be relentless!
He's a time-travelling anti-software patent crusader from the distant future. He travelled to the dawn of the computer age to publish a set of books containing all the algorithms known throughout time to establish prior art. Unfortunately, most people don't read his books and thus we're still troubled by software patents.
un-ALTERED reproduction and dissimination of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED
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!
And don't forget that METAFONT is at version 2.718281
Wrong. The new version number will be larger than the previous one, obviously, by 5e-8. And even if you read the number as 3.integer, the new integer has one more digit than the old one. Why do you think it should be lower?
By the way, TeX version numbers are converging to pi, and Metafont version numbers are converging to e. This is intentional. Rumor has it that this should show how TeX and Metafont converge to perfection.
You fail math forever.
3.1415927 is indeed greater than 3.14159265
Consequently, the poster is correct. If the current version number were rounded instead of truncated, the next version would indeed have a lower number than the previous version. This is why the poster (correctly) pointed out that rounding would have been a mistake.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Who is Knuth? He's my homeboy.
What? Read the post I'm replying to. The guy's talking about rounding up!
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
What happened to volumes four through seventy three ?
I have no problem leaving my laptop on the table for a few minutes in a reasonably full coffee shop. Who's going to steal a laptop in full view of 25 people? I have enough faith in humanity that someone would say something when a person came along and tried to grab a computer that wasn't theirs. I'd certainly do so. I might even try a tackle. Do you think that every one of those people is a member of a laptop-stealing ring? A new twist on the con-man's "store"? Coffee shop as a front: suckers come in, get some coffee, and get their laptop ganked?
You assume that the other people in the establishment took enough notice of you to recognize that you are not the one walking out with your laptop. All it takes is enough confidence to act as if everything is as it should be and almost nobody will question whether or not you own that thing you just picked up.
While we're on the topic of TAOCP, I have the first one and have tried reading through it (currently starting as a junior CS student), but have been struggling a little bit with the language he uses for his examples. What language is that, and are there any good tutorials online so I can just sort of pick it up and figure out the rest of it so I can understand his use of algorithms?
I had to check to see if you were kidding! And actually:
ali@katamari:~$ tex --version
TeX 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
The joke is that he says he's going to quit working on it when he reaches version pi. So he just keeps adding significant digits, without ever getting there.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The Indian editions are cheap. Cheaper paper and binding, but each of V1,2 and 3 are ~ 12 USD each.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
The point of (M)MIX is that it is unlike any language, and yet like and so people are not distracted by it being like the language of the moment, it is there to show fundamental algorithms not how to code ...
You can bet the the designers of C# own very worn copies of Knuth's books, it is one of the compiler writers bibles ...it is still relevant because it is so fundamental, there are tricks you can use in each language to speed up or simplify but all depend on you knowing the basics first, and all of these are in (or will be...) in Knuth ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
There are two problems with ACP - firstly, the reference of everything to that ludicrous imaginary MIX architecture, and secondly, those awful TEX fonts which give the impression that the book was published in 1962 and became obsolete ten seconds later. My heart sinks whenever I open a computer science book and see that typography. Credit where it's due however, it does have the only explanation of implementing regular expression quantifiers that I've ever managed to understand.
You assume that the other people in the establishment took enough notice of you to recognize that you are not the one walking out with your laptop. All it takes is enough confidence to act as if everything is as it should be and almost nobody will question whether or not you own that thing you just picked up.
Want a free laptop? Walk up to someone elses laptop while they're in the can, drink a swig of their coffee, and walk out with the coffee and laptop. No one would drink someone elses coffee, right?
Admittedly I was thinking a lot more about a mostly empty coffee shop. One thats packed and loud is probably worse than cubicles at work, probably worse than an open plan at work.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
You now have 4 data points, so can someone draw a plot to see when the next volume is coming out?
Some time in the future, would be my guess.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You would think someone this pretentious would at least make an effort to know the difference between who and whom.
No, I intentionally do it to piss people off. Works pretty well!
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
"Is that a copy of Knuth? Hang on—volume four? But he only finished the first three volumes in that series! Volume four's been overdue for the past twenty years!"
"Yup. We—or the Black Chamber—have a little agreement with him; he doesn't publish volume four of The Art of Computer Programming, and they don't render him metabolically challenged."