
Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science - henning
https://introtcs.org/public/index.html
======
wendyshu
Previously
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19310358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19310358)
(28 comments)

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melvinroest
When it comes to theoretical CS, I use Shai Simonson his course on the theory
of computation [1]. I passed my actual university course by not going to the
lectures. Not even once! All the same material was covered in Shai his video
lectures.

Shai Simonson is awesome (disclaimer: I'm a fan!), so if for whatever reason
the above course doesn't work out for you, might I suggest his course? [1] ;-)

[1]
[http://www.aduni.org/courses/theory/index.php?view=cw](http://www.aduni.org/courses/theory/index.php?view=cw)

Note: quickly skimming the chapter outline, I think Shai's course covers up
until chapter 15, maybe 16 out of 22.

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pdevr
For a theoretical CS book, it is readable, with the concepts progressively
introduced to the reader. Pretty decent work.

On a lighter note:

All the previous chapters seem to connive to lead the unsuspecting reader to
chapters 14 and 15, and then to section 15.7.

"So far we have shown that 3SAT is no harder than Quadratic Equations,
Independent Set, Maximum Cut, and Longest Path. [...] It turns out we can
reduce all three problems to 3SAT in one fell swoop."

Yeah, yeah. You think we don't know where you're going with this?

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LMYahooTFY
I feel I'm missing some sort of joke that requires knowledge of these
topics....?

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glbrew
NP?

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agumonkey
theoretical computer science is too pragmatic

we need abstract higher order theoretical computer science

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anongraddebt
This.

But, maybe we can go even higher such that the material has zero pragmatic
pay-off?

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agumonkey
How much of research has zero pragmatic pay-off .. until it does ?

\-- J. McCarthy circa. 1958

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caleb-allen
This is great! I dropped out of school after my sophomore year, and got an ACM
membership and spent a lot of time reading papers from the digital library
there.

This is a wonderful resources for me, to see where the blanks in my knowledge
of the field are.

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agucova
This is extremely cool! And I love how even the requirements are extensively
covered and described with links to other courses.

I'll be definitely taking a look at this :p

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kareninoverseas
This is a lot to cover if it's a one year course (unsurprisingly).

I struggled with P/NP and that was in a 3rd year algorithms course.

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zerr
> about 600 pages

Any 200 pages alternative?

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winedrinker
The other day I tried reducing the length of a long winded pdf with
outline.com It went as well as you'd expect. The site almost broke the link.
Hear that HN entrepreneurs? There's an untapped niche for those who can reduce
the volume of any technical book by at least 1/3 without losing any info.

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AnimalMuppet
Easy. LZW compress it. Comprehensibility suffers a bit, though.

Kidding, but there's a point: If you want to make it 1/3 shorter, and not lose
any info, it has to be denser. That won't make it easier to read - probably
the opposite, in fact.

