5 ms·

There will always be a "higher" type of engineers who want to read TAOCP and similar. My issue with the books is that they're actually quite long winded even b

by mhh__ 4y ago

There will always be a "higher" type of engineers who want to read TAOCP and similar. My issue with the books is that they're actually quite long winded even by what you'd expect from the tone. There's some really cool stuff in them, obviously, but I think they're objectively not very good textbooks for any purpose. Then again I'm coming from a background of physics rather than mathematics so I'm not set out for a real battle of wits when it comes to constructing proofs.

kenjackson 4y ago
I think they are excellent textbooks if your goal is to learn all about algorithms. And by this I mean he takes these great tangents into slightly different derivations that lead to wildly different complexities. Or why somethings are actually ambiguous or some interesting special case. And maybe even more importantly, a great collection of problems to work through. I think it is actually an underappreciated text nowadays.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  My gripe is that there is an order through them that is an excellent textbook, but the lexical order through the book is usually very long winded and meanders immensely. Meandering through topics is good, but he meanders through style as well: sometimes he was in a mathematical mood, sometimes he was feeling more practical. I think it's better to intuit first then formalize, Knuth likes to do these in groups of pairs rather than a pair of groups. Knuth is not the worst at this, but the lost potential is the greatest in his writing.
gonehome 4y ago
Related to your higher type of engineer: http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Profession%20I%20Asimov.pdf http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Professio... It’s a good short story if you’ve got 20min.
- jwogrady 4y ago
  Excellent suggestion. I enjoyed it. Just one question. How the hell does anyone read all that in 20 minutes?
  - gonehome 4y ago
    Maybe 40min? It's been a long time since I've read it.
hintymad 4y ago
TAOCP is meant to be a textbook, a reference, and a historical account of algorithm development. I find it most rewarding to pick the most interesting part to me at the moment to read. I also ignore the MMIX code (even though I did work through the MMIXware book) and focus on first intuition, then code, and then the math that teaches me new ideas or new methods. I find the MMIX code less relevant to my line of work now as getting down to machine-level optimization requires a whole new different suite of tools. The ensuing optimizations on modern CPUs seem deviated from what the MMIX code can help.
gralx 4y ago
Yeah, TAOCP's casual style puts me off too. Side by side with high watermarks in technical writing like The C Programming Language, Specifying Systems, or Loney's Elements of Coordinate Geometry its shortcomings are pretty obvious. But that's an opportunity for a clever editor to make an actual reference manual out of TAOCP sometime in the future. Knuth's a good, engaging writer, but TAOCP's content and typography are definitely better thought out than the prose. EDIT: Just remembered a BBC interview with a philosophy professor about Kant. Apparently Kant is criticized for being really verbose. The professor's retort was he sensed Kant had so much to say and so little time to say it that he didn't edit very carefully, giving it a similar kind of bloated, meandering quality. Even so, Kant is held up as one of the GOATs, because in the end it's the content that counts.

by mhh__ 4y ago

kenjackson 4y ago

I think they are excellent textbooks if your goal is to learn all about algorithms. And by this I mean he takes these great tangents into slightly different derivations that lead to wildly different complexities. Or why somethings are actually ambiguous or some interesting special case. And maybe even more importantly, a great collection of problems to work through. I think it is actually an underappreciated text nowadays.

mhh__ 4y ago
My gripe is that there is an order through them that is an excellent textbook, but the lexical order through the book is usually very long winded and meanders immensely. Meandering through topics is good, but he meanders through style as well: sometimes he was in a mathematical mood, sometimes he was feeling more practical. I think it's better to intuit first then formalize, Knuth likes to do these in groups of pairs rather than a pair of groups. Knuth is not the worst at this, but the lost potential is the greatest in his writing.

gonehome 4y ago

Related to your higher type of engineer: http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Profession%20I%20Asimov.pdf http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Professio... It’s a good short story if you’ve got 20min.

jwogrady 4y ago
Excellent suggestion. I enjoyed it. Just one question. How the hell does anyone read all that in 20 minutes?
- gonehome 4y ago
  Maybe 40min? It's been a long time since I've read it.

hintymad 4y ago

TAOCP is meant to be a textbook, a reference, and a historical account of algorithm development. I find it most rewarding to pick the most interesting part to me at the moment to read. I also ignore the MMIX code (even though I did work through the MMIXware book) and focus on first intuition, then code, and then the math that teaches me new ideas or new methods. I find the MMIX code less relevant to my line of work now as getting down to machine-level optimization requires a whole new different suite of tools. The ensuing optimizations on modern CPUs seem deviated from what the MMIX code can help.

gralx 4y ago

Yeah, TAOCP's casual style puts me off too. Side by side with high watermarks in technical writing like The C Programming Language, Specifying Systems, or Loney's Elements of Coordinate Geometry its shortcomings are pretty obvious. But that's an opportunity for a clever editor to make an actual reference manual out of TAOCP sometime in the future. Knuth's a good, engaging writer, but TAOCP's content and typography are definitely better thought out than the prose. EDIT: Just remembered a BBC interview with a philosophy professor about Kant. Apparently Kant is criticized for being really verbose. The professor's retort was he sensed Kant had so much to say and so little time to say it that he didn't edit very carefully, giving it a similar kind of bloated, meandering quality. Even so, Kant is held up as one of the GOATs, because in the end it's the content that counts.