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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
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.
General public's view of:
Programmer: A fat guy behind a PC making Facebook and Google.
Engineer: An intelligent construction worker.
Scientist: A guy doing pointless research just so he can say he does research.
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.
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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#
...and until Vol.1 is updated:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html
'As I continue to write Volumes 4 and 5, I'll need to refer to topics that belong logically in Volumes 1--3 but weren't invented yet when I wrote those books. Instead of putting such material artificially into Volumes 4 or 5, I'll put it into fascicle form. The first such fascicle is in fact ready now (see above): It describes MMIX, a RISC machine that is used in Volume 4A; MMIX will also take the place of MIX in all subsequent editions of Volumes 1, 2, and 3.
Download the 16 Feb 2004 version of Volume 1 Fascicle 1 (583KB of compressed PostScript) (this old version is however no longer being maintained)':
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/fasc1.ps.gz
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.
there's several erratas on his website, one of those is exactly about MMIX.
site
fascicle 1: MMIX (compressed postscript).
on the site he tells which parts of volume 1 are replaced by the fascicle.
What ? Me, worry ?
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.
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!