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It isn't really the kind of book you use on a day-to-day basis; you consume it in small doses (after crossing the initial cliff of notation, et cetera), like vi
by mangamadaiyan 7y ago
It isn't really the kind of book you use on a day-to-day basis; you consume it in small doses (after crossing the initial cliff of notation, et cetera), like vitamin supplements. That doesn't make it any less useful, however.
- dfox 7y agoToday having physical copy of TAOCP is mostly only useful as the coffee table/conference room artifact. All the stuff in there is either well known because it is part of basic CS curriculum, better analyzed by subsequent works or mostly irrelevant.
- klodolph 7y agoMy personal experience is that anything in TAOCP can be found elsewhere in a more accessible format.
- svat 7y agoThat's interesting; my personal experience is the opposite: for most things in TAOCP, it is written more clearly than its source material, especially as it gets to the more advanced topics within each section (often only published in papers, not yet in books). For example, Section 7.1.4 on Binary Decision Diagrams, aka BDDs and ZDDs (pages 202–280 of Volume 4A, draft online: http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/knuth/fasc1b.pdf http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/knuth/fasc1b.pdf) is not something I've seen explained to that level of clarity and detail anywhere else. Plus there are a lot of Knuth's original ideas in the books; his innovation is not restricted to summarizing and teaching.
- frans 7y agoTAOCP = The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth
- svat 7y agoSorry, I don't understand: could you clarify why you're telling me this? Was there anything in my comment that seemed like it was talking about something else?
- lioeters 7y agoI think the parent comment was trying to be helpful for other readers who might not know what TAOCP stood for, since it wasn't defined from the beginning of the comment branch. For what it's worth, I appreciated your defense of the book, that there's genuine value in reading it, rather than as a "coffee table book" (I guess social signalling); that Knuth explains things clearly and in detail, with unique approach and insights.
- svat 7y agoAh that makes sense, thank you. Always good to explain acronyms; it just didn't occur to me that it was a reply to the whole subtree of comments, so I was confused how to respond.