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Except everyone who talks about how to read the books successfully--including the books themselves--talk about jumping around in them in a way that requires a l
by moron4hire 4y ago
Except everyone who talks about how to read the books successfully--including the books themselves--talk about jumping around in them in a way that requires a lot of skimming.
I don't find the text in any other book I own to be insufficient, or even noticeably that different from Knuth's books (with the obvious exception of some fly-by-night print-on-demand stuff purchased off Amazon in recent years). It's an assertion in want of proof. TeX might be the greatest example of Yak Shaving in human history: Knuth spent at least 30 years between Volumes 3 and 4 to work on TeX because of dissatisfaction with layout in V3.
This is what I'm talking about. Notice the use of colored blocks and whitespace to break up the flow of the page, to callout different asides and section headers.
https://twitter.com/Sean_McBeth/status/1577388169418383363 https://twitter.com/Sean_McBeth/status/1577388169418383363
Adding whitespace doesn't have to make the book longer. It could just make the book wider. Besides, paper is cheap.
https://twitter.com/Sean_McBeth/status/1577388234589478914 https://twitter.com/Sean_McBeth/status/1577388234589478914
- commandlinefan 4y ago> everyone who talks about how to read the books successfully I will be a counterexample: I read all three cover to cover, and seriously attempted every single exercise (although in some cases, "attempted" just meant "actually understand what he's asking, which in itself sometimes took me several days). I didn't skim or jump around at all.
- andrepd 4y agoSubjectively, I like TAoCP's typography much better. But hey, that's just me.
- girvo 4y agoI like TAoCP's typography better in a subjective aesthetic sense. But when I'm actually trying to read, understand, and work-from workbooks/exercises, I find the Linear Algebra example a lot better.
- fragmede 4y agoPaper's having supply chain issues, same as everything else. https://www.npr.org/2021/10/04/1043145212/supply-chain-issues-are-slowing-the-production-of-books-ahead-of-the-holidays https://www.npr.org/2021/10/04/1043145212/supply-chain-issue...