Volume 4A of Knuth's TAOCP Finally In Print 173
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."
Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
So was Charlie Stross wrong? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who else hasn't read his copy of volume three? (Score:3, Interesting)
I came into programming from a math background. Every time I try to read his books, the programming stuff is wonderful and then he writes something about a math problem or two and I lose a week of my life.
Re:Who else hasn't read his copy of volume three? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've actually leaned on both volumes 2 and 3. The discussions about floating point and number systems are very useful in Volume 2. The sorting and searching networks in Volume 3 are must-have reading if you're trying to do complex sorting functions on highly parallel machines. (Think median filters, for an example, particularly in the context of sub-word SIMD.)
I read the first couple draft fascicles for Volume 4A, and see a bunch in there I can directly apply to other work I do, such as exhaustively evaluating portions of a larger search space. Also, some of the Boolean logic properties are very interesting.
Fun fact: It turns out that during the exact same month (March 2007?), both Knuth and I attacked essentially the same problem. We both set out to find minimal instruction sequences to implement all Boolean functions of 5 variables. I didn't find this out until well after the fact, while hunting through his website looking for a new Volume 4 fascicle. We actually had fairly similar results, but his approach was far more elegant (naturally). Also, mine was constrained to tree-like sequences and a specific target instruction set, whereas his permitted any DAG and used more generic Boolean operations. (For example, I had a "not-and" operation which does "A and not B", whereas I don't think he did.) Still, it was rather amusing to see we had both tackled the same problem at about the same time, and came up with similar overall results.