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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 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.
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.
Donald Knuth has published a book and a date has been set for the release of Duke Nukem Forever? It's all too much.
Get off my lawn!
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.
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).
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
He's a professor. I'm pretty sure he can procrastinate without the aid of email. He wrote an entire typesetting system as a procrastination exercise once! Most PhD students would envy that level of dedication to The Art Of Procrastination.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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#
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).
Kindle / etc / generally seems to suffer under the load of large equations and diagrams. OK for the latest Tom Clancy or Gibbons decline and fall of the roman empire, not so hot for this application.
If you're talking about PDFs of Knuths work to read on the laptop, those are, uh, available, from the usual sources.
Personally I was more excited to receive the final (?) eighth collection of Knuths papers that being the "fun and games". Got it in the mail last week, barely cracked open yet. Has his "famous" MAD magazine articles.
Now an off the wall question, do people really program in coffee shops (other than ron ivi) ? I have the impression locally that they are bar / meat market equivalent for non-drinkers, people whom want to re-enact "friends" episodes, and homeless / urban campers ala the recent one zillion "hacker public radio" series. Do you just leave your $$$$$$ laptop and confidential corporate papers on the desk when you go to the can? Does the staff tolerate your presence?
I have worked in parks, at least a couple hours until the battery dies, its not like I'm locked in my office.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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
Cool! Now we can call it the Reverend Volume 4A.
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...
Hmm... How would you fold the cover of Mad magazine on an e-reader?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The final "its" is what caused the stroke though.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Hack the e-reader to install Linux.
Install Perl.
The rest is left as an exercise to the student.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
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.
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!
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.