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I recommend you read through volumes 1 and 3 cursorily, skipping things you can't immediately understand. I read through volume 1 several times. I then skimmed

by jll29 3y ago

I recommend you read through volumes 1 and 3 cursorily, skipping things you can't immediately understand. I read through volume 1 several times. I then skimmed through the arithmetics part of volume 2 and read only the section about random numbers, which is very fascinating but you will be able to live without unless you are doing simulations or cryptography/cryptoanalysis. Whether you will need volumes 4a, b, c depends on whether your work has much to do with combinatorics. I'm a professor and I did not need most of it, but had a good laugh about the hidden gems and jokes like the exercise about Knuths personal pipe organ. As a software engineer, you may occasionally consult volumes 3 and 1 (searching, sorting, data structures). [Side node: If I was Knuth, I don't think I would have created three subvolumes instead of the planned single volume 4. While it is true that the material exploded, that will always be the case, and is also true for the other chapters. In his shoes, I would have worked on succession planning and trying to map out the remaining volumes so that the book can be completed one day. Under Knuths approach (esp. going back to update the existing volumes repeatedly on the way) TAOCP will unlikely ever be completed, which would be a shame.]

teo_zero 3y ago
Are you suggesting that Knuth's approach is "depth first"?
- vjerancrnjak 3y ago
  It's interesting how far he takes particular topics. One on binary decision diagrams ended up with novel algorithms related to zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams. I think he even "broke" counting records for various hard counting problems (and submitted the numbers at OEIS). It does feel that sometimes he goes deeper than what you'd expect from a 7 volume book. As with any complicated topic, you need to give yourself some sleep to be able to truly intuit it.
michaelrpeskin 3y ago
Yeah, this is how I read TAOCP. I was a grad student working on computational chemistry, so I had lots of downtime waiting for code to compile or long calculations to run (and I didn't have the fancy cloud to run tons of stuff in parallel). I got TAOCP out of the library and just read through it from beginning to end. I didn't work any problems and I skipped the "hard" stuff like proofs (side note: that's how I read all math, I read what they're proving, but don't follow along with the proof, I just tuck it away in my head what was proved and then if I come across a problem where I need it then I go back and try to understand it). One day I was working on a problem and I realized that I was storing a lot of 0's in my matrix and I remembered that I read about sparse matrices in TAOCP (this was before you could just go to numpy and make a sparse matrix). So I went back to that chapter and used that to solve my problem. That's happened to me many times in my career now, I remember that I read the general idea in TAOCP and then when I realize I need it, I go back and learn it for real. If you want to be someone who understands computation (using computers to solve real problem), then it's probably good to have "read" TAOCP just to see what kinds of problems other people have encountered and know that there is at least one good solution to them. Then if you ever need to solve that problem, you know where to look for a start. A little more philosophical: a culture needs a common core set of ideas that everyone can reference. When working together as a group, having a set of common ideas is a great shortcut in communicating. I'm not religious, but I see the bible as a historical way that this worked for the western cultures - there was a set of "givens" that everyone could hang their ideas off of. Every field of knowledge needs this common understanding. I view TAOCP as this for the field of computing. There are better ways to solve many of the problems now, or common libraries that provide the solutions, but having the problems named and discussed gives everyone a good starting place to talk. tl;dr - yes, TAOCP is good, read it to learn the concepts and ideas that people smarter than you solved years ago.

by jll29 3y ago

teo_zero 3y ago

Are you suggesting that Knuth's approach is "depth first"?

vjerancrnjak 3y ago
It's interesting how far he takes particular topics. One on binary decision diagrams ended up with novel algorithms related to zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams. I think he even "broke" counting records for various hard counting problems (and submitted the numbers at OEIS). It does feel that sometimes he goes deeper than what you'd expect from a 7 volume book. As with any complicated topic, you need to give yourself some sleep to be able to truly intuit it.

michaelrpeskin 3y ago

Yeah, this is how I read TAOCP. I was a grad student working on computational chemistry, so I had lots of downtime waiting for code to compile or long calculations to run (and I didn't have the fancy cloud to run tons of stuff in parallel). I got TAOCP out of the library and just read through it from beginning to end. I didn't work any problems and I skipped the "hard" stuff like proofs (side note: that's how I read all math, I read what they're proving, but don't follow along with the proof, I just tuck it away in my head what was proved and then if I come across a problem where I need it then I go back and try to understand it). One day I was working on a problem and I realized that I was storing a lot of 0's in my matrix and I remembered that I read about sparse matrices in TAOCP (this was before you could just go to numpy and make a sparse matrix). So I went back to that chapter and used that to solve my problem. That's happened to me many times in my career now, I remember that I read the general idea in TAOCP and then when I realize I need it, I go back and learn it for real. If you want to be someone who understands computation (using computers to solve real problem), then it's probably good to have "read" TAOCP just to see what kinds of problems other people have encountered and know that there is at least one good solution to them. Then if you ever need to solve that problem, you know where to look for a start. A little more philosophical: a culture needs a common core set of ideas that everyone can reference. When working together as a group, having a set of common ideas is a great shortcut in communicating. I'm not religious, but I see the bible as a historical way that this worked for the western cultures - there was a set of "givens" that everyone could hang their ideas off of. Every field of knowledge needs this common understanding. I view TAOCP as this for the field of computing. There are better ways to solve many of the problems now, or common libraries that provide the solutions, but having the problems named and discussed gives everyone a good starting place to talk. tl;dr - yes, TAOCP is good, read it to learn the concepts and ideas that people smarter than you solved years ago.