
Knuth TAOCP, Volume 4A Arrives. Pre-Order Your Copy - yarapavan
http://www.informit.com/promotions/promotion.aspx?promo=138111
======
haberman
Every time I think "today is the day when I'm actually going to work through
some of TAOCP" I remember that I'd have to learn MMIX.

Knuth is obviously one-of-a-kind, but for me personally learning a new
architecture requires more brain space than I have to spare, and pretty much
guarantees I'll never read it. Which makes me a bit sad.

I know that at the time, C looked like it might pass by like Pascal did before
it, but in retrospect I think C would have aged far better and made the book
far more approachable.

It's a bit ironic, because one of the main justifications for using a machine
language was that high-level languages go in and out of style. But Knuth did
not avoid this himself, as MIX (a CISC-like architecture) was obsoleted and
had to be replaced with MMIX (a RISC-like architecture)!

~~~
kabdib
You don't actually need to use MIX; my course used TAOCP and skipped most of
the assembly-level stuff, and everyone did fine just psuedo-coding things.
I've never written a single line of MIX.

So, skip the whole half of Vol. 1.

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randrews
I'm looking forward to this. I can't claim to have rigorously done every
exercise, but I did read the books closely enough to know what was in there if
I ever need to, say, write a garbage collector.

The real reason to read them, though, is because roughly every third page will
have something you just have to play with, like the neat things in the part on
circular lists (sorry to be vague, it's been a few years). Buy it: there's so
much in there you're guaranteed to find something fascinating.

~~~
jordanb
I've also read volumes I-III closely enough to do the easiest problems, and
would like to find the time to go back and perhaps study some of the more
interesting parts in more depth.

Knuth gets accused of being abstruse, but compared to most math books I've
read, he's very clear. Moreover, he has a genuine unpretentious fascination
with the things about which he's writing, and that enthusiasm comes through in
his writing.

For that reason I'll be buying and enjoying the fourth volume, although I'd
like to wait until all three "sub" volumes are published so I can get them in
a box.

Unfortunately, though, I don't think Knuth would be a good reference for
garbage collection anymore. That particular problem (and several others
covered in the books) have moved so quickly that Knuth's descriptions haven't
aged well. His most advanced example of GC was a crude mark-and-sweep system,
which would be horribly archaic if implemented today.

PS: I had occasion a while back to implement a random number generator that
produced numbers from a normal distribution. It was a lot of fun to crack
Volume II open and use it as my reference (after poking around a bit to make
sure the information wasn't obsolete).

~~~
randrews
Hopefully, if I am writing a garbage collector from scratch, it won't be in a
context where performance matters. :) I thought the best part of that section
was that the garbage collector ran in constant space, which makes sense as a
requirement but isn't something I had thought about before.

> Knuth gets accused of being abstruse, but compared to most math books I've
> read, he's very clear. Moreover, he has a genuine unpretentious fascination
> with the things about which he's writing, and that enthusiasm comes through
> in his writing.

I totally agree. I guess the complaints are because where other books just say
"see? get it?", TAOCP keeps going, down to measuring the complexity (not the
order of complexity, actually counting how many times each instruction gets
executed, which I think is why he uses MIX instead of a higher-level
language).

. . . Man, now I want to drop _Elements of Computing Systems_ and go back and
read volume I again.

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mindcrime
Awww, that is mondo righteous! Go Knuth!

I just hope he lives long enough to complete the rest of the book(s) he has
planned. This thing took so long that it's, like, the Duke Nukem Forever of CS
books. :-(

~~~
tomjen3
Duke Nukem Forever is available for preorder from
Amazon[[http://www.amazon.com/Duke-Nukem-Forever-
Pc/dp/B002I0JAJ2/re...](http://www.amazon.com/Duke-Nukem-Forever-
Pc/dp/B002I0JAJ2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1295033339&sr=8-1)]

Which means you can catch Atlas Shrugged
[<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480239/>] in a movie theater near you before
you play the game.

~~~
cryptoz
Duke Nukem Forever was on preorder in 2001, too. The status of DNF is "never"
until people are actually playing the game...just because it's on preorder
again doesn't mean it's _actually going to come out_.

[http://kotaku.com/5634491/think-this-duke-nukem-forever-
pre+...](http://kotaku.com/5634491/think-this-duke-nukem-forever-pre+order-is-
still-valid)

~~~
norswap
People have already played it, at game conventions and the such, there is
plenty of footage available online.

Only a nuclear holocaust can prevent the release of the game now.

~~~
tjr
The obvious connection, of course, is that the developers of Duke Nukem
Forever needed to read Volume 4A (in fascicle form, at least) in order to
actually complete the development of the game. ;-)

------
angrycoder
If anyone is planning preordering via this link, here is how to do it to get
the lowest possible price:

Don't apply the coupon code. You actually get it for a lower price if you just
add it to your cart and checkout as normal. There is an extra deal going on
right now that lowers the price another 5% on orders over $55. Applying the
coupon cancels this extra deal.

You end up getting the book for $149.99 vs $162.49 if you use the coupon.
Great deal, and 50 dollars lower than amazon's preorder price.

------
jonhendry
Is this the expurgated version or does it include the missing information
about Dho-Nha curves and other occult matters?

------
ladyada
Meanwhile, the electrical engineers have been waiting for Art of Electronics
v3 for a decade... "its coming out real soon, its being edited right now!"

~~~
softbuilder
Ha! I've been wondering for years if they would do a third edition. You've
given me hope.

------
revolvingcur
It's amusing that they're releasing a box set for Volumes 1-4A, although I
suppose it took longer to get Volume 4A to press than the entirety of the
Harry Potter series (and they released a boxed set after pretty much every
volume of HP).

That's by far the best price I've seen for the collected volumes though.

------
jackfoxy
Have there been any fascicles published for volume 4B?

~~~
michael_dorfman
No. In fact, there haven't been any pre-fascicles (electronic drafts) released
yet, either.

~~~
jackfoxy
TAOCP site <http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html> now estimates
volume 5 will come out in 2020, and there are already links to errata in
volume 4A

~~~
eftpotrm
I wouldn't want to be the publisher betting on a 73 year old with a history of
missing deadlines hitting one in nine years time.

And then, from the site:

\---

 _After Volume 5 has been completed, I will revise Volumes 1--3 again to bring
them up to date. In particular, the new material for those volumes that has
been issued in beta-test fascicles will be incorporated at that time.

Then I will publish a ``reader's digest'' edition of Volumes 1--5, condensing
the most important material into a single book.

And after Volumes 1--5 are done, God willing, I plan to publish Volume 6 (the
theory of context-free languages) and Volume 7 (Compiler techniques), but only
if the things I want to say about those topics are still relevant and still
haven't been said. Volumes 1--5 represent the central core of computer
programming for sequential machines; the subjects of Volumes 6 and 7 are
important but more specialized. _ \---

Which would all be wonderful, but seems possibly overoptimistic. Sadly.

------
Isamu
Color me surprised, I didn't know that InformIT was the publisher now. I guess
I gotta get out more. I think I bought mine in the 80's (paid $43.95 for vol
1, list price).

Dang, I've been waiting a while for vol 4.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Color you confused, actually. Addison-Wesley is the publisher, as they have
always been. They are a subsidiary of Pearson, as is InformIT.

But feel free to get out more, anyway.

~~~
Isamu
Thanks for your helpful comment. But it looks rather like Addison-Wesley
Professional exists only as a brand name now, and as a publisher they seem to
have been fully absorbed, and their former offices gone some time ago by what
I now gather.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Well, in the publishing world, a "brand name" is known as an imprint, and many
major publishers fall into that category. For example, Penguin and Viking are
also imprints of Pearson. Random House, Doubleday, Knopf, Bantam, Ballantine,
Pantheon, and Vintage are all imprints of Bertelsmann. And so on...

And I apologize if my original response came across as snarky-- I was aiming
for jovial.

~~~
Isamu
No problem, I guess I am concerned about names like AW becoming not just
acquired but absorbed in such a way that makes me wonder about the future.
When I'm interested in a book, one of the things I look at is the publisher -
if it is one of the names I respect, then they probably took the time to make
sure the book isn't a waste of time.

No doubt staff is drastically reduced in these acquisitions. How does a high-
quality name avoid falling apart? Do they start shoveling crap to compete?

The available titles in computing have certainly vastly increased since I
started out (for that I am thankful), but for many publishers the quality of
editing is very poor.

------
kahawe
I think I have been putting this off far too long but... do you guys think one
could study TAOCP alone, without studying at MIT or Berkeley? I have been
working with computers since more than 18 years as a programmer and sys
architect but my studies never included those awesome books like TAOCP.

I am not very fluent in maths, so now I am worried if it is at all
understandable to study it on my own? Maybe I am completely off in my
assumptions here.. I would appreciate some feedback!

Oh and, any other equally fundamental IT/computers/programming MUST_READS you
can recommend?

~~~
ams6110
One of the volumes (I think the subtitle was "Sorting and Searching") was used
in my undergrad CS program, and I definitely didn't go to MIT or Berkeley.

It's comprehensible, though it's definitely not written in an "algorithms for
dummys" style. Check it out from a library and give it a try... you might be
surprised.

------
mariuskempe
No offense to Knuth, who I'm sure is a great dude, but the fact that he of all
people is releasing this as a book in 2011 is totally ludicrous.

~~~
michael_dorfman
How so? I am sure that there might be some who would prefer to read a work as
difficult (and intricately typeset) as TAOCP on a screen instead of paper, but
I imagine they'd be a minority.

~~~
kenjackson
Despite what some may say TAOCP is a very readable series of books. But they
do require being read in hardcopy, at a table, with a pen(cil) and notepad.

This isn't something you read on your Kindle while taking the Subway uptown.

~~~
mariuskempe
No offense again, but all of the replies to my comment are equally ludicrous.
If it were digitally available, you could search and index it, text mine it,
distribute it to people in poorer countries, carry it with you when you move a
lot. These are all the obvious advantages of ebooks, and nothing about TAOCP
makes it especially necessary for a digital version. To make an educated
guess, the problem must be some part of Knuth's attitude to life - he spent a
major chunk of his life designing a system to make things you type in from a
computer look good on paper.

Edit: to clarify, I'm not saying it shouldn't be on paper - freedom of choice!
- I'm saying it should also be available digitally. And to the person who said
that TAOCP is only a collector's item, you're completely ludicrous.

~~~
kenjackson
_No offense again, but all of the replies to my comment are equally
ludicrous._

I beg to differ. While they may all have been ludicrous, they were not equally
so.

~~~
mariuskempe
Yes, that's true. :-)

I expect this comment will be downvoted as well.

~~~
kenjackson
I brought you back to zero. :-)

