13 ms·

How The Art of Computer Programming was ruined for me

194 points by anuragramdasan 13y ago

ExpiredLink 13y ago
The fonts on this page are too large. Make them smaller!
- sukuriant 13y ago
  And zooming in does not make a left-right scroll bar. That's what I had to do to read it. That font is really, really tiny on my 1900 x 1200 screen
  - anuragramdasan 13y ago
    Eeek, sorry. Fixing it at the moment. :)
  - CapitalistCartr 13y ago
    "Control +" is your friend.
    - sukuriant 13y ago
      That's what I did; but it's still a poor, customized-beyond defaults, resolution. I'm curious to load that page in high DPI mode for users with vision impairments and see if it increases in size.
- markbernard 13y ago
  Fonts are not too large. The base font on any web page should be 16point.
deletes 13y ago
Imagine getting a Xeroxed copy of the illegal version of the book.
- pmiller2 13y ago
  Lions' commentary on Unix was passed around for years like this before it was allowed to be officially published. There's a grand tradition of samizdat in academia for stuff like this (mostly pre-prints, though).
  - deletes 13y ago
    I was hinting at the latest Xerox fiasco. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238
peterkelly 13y ago
There's a reason why the version you bought was Rs 400, not Rs 5000. That much of a price differential should be a red flag.
- anuragramdasan 13y ago
  Actually almost all the Indian editions of the book are much more cheaper than its US based price in Dollars. And when you look at the paper quality, it feels like the price is justified. Also not to look over the fact that both are published by PearsonEd. The US version by Addison-Wesley and the Indian version by Dorling-Kindersley. Both are PearsonEd subsidiaries.
  - pmiller2 13y ago
    Indeed. My current copy of CLRS3 is a like-new Eastern Economy Edition paperback. I paid $20 or $30 for it off Amazon versus $92 list price or $55 on Amazon for the hardcover, and I considered that to be a good deal.
    - anuragramdasan 13y ago
      Yes. CLRS I had ordered almost the same time as TAOCP and although I was skeptical at the beginning, I was surprised that it was a good edition. The biggest problem is though, once we've bought the Indian edition, we wont buy the original edition(obviously). This makes it difficult for us to gauge how much off the edition we own is from the original one.
      - pmiller2 13y ago
        I used the Eastern Economy Edition version of CLRS2 in a course I was taking. I never found a difference other than page numbering (which was accurately reflected in the index and table of contents), so I think you're okay on that one. :-)
    - LeonidasXIV 13y ago
      I paid 2€ for CLRS2 when my library threw it out. In pretty good condition, hard cover. Possibly the best deal I ever made.
JimmaDaRustla 13y ago
Makes a good case for advancing digital versions of text books...
- anuragramdasan 13y ago
  Probably. But still printed books are going to be the most widely used approach and giving such a treatment to education related books are never good for students.
- reikonomusha 13y ago
  If there is any book that you should get in paper form, it is TAoCP. This is one book where the author has taken great care, and decades of work, to truly build the book from the ground up. The book, the fonts, and the style were developed for paper. Knuth even has 5 other volumes of books containing the instructions and source code to reproduce almost every single curve, stroke, and space you see in the books. I think advocating digital publishing is probably good, but not for all things. Books shouldn't be treated as source code with continuous deployment. Even one word on one page can massively restructure the rest of the document, making it extremely difficult to coordinate and fix. What I think should be fixed is the dissemination of authentic books at a reasonable price, for especially students who typically don't have much money at all.
  - pmiller2 13y ago
    I agree wholeheartedly with this. As an owner of all 4 volumes currently out, I have to say I enjoy everything about these books, except for the choice of MIX as the programming language. :P
  - jpatokal 13y ago
    Don't forget the typesetting: Knuth wrote TeX because he was unhappy with the alternatives.
    - billforsternz 13y ago
      He didn't forget the typesetting. He (the parent) was basically writing about the typesetting.
phaus 13y ago
I honestly don't understand how you can live in India and expect shit like this not to happen. People in India don't even have the reasonable expectation of riding a public bus without getting raped to death, how cold you possibly expect the authorities to care about counterfeit books? India is a beautiful place, with lots of brilliant, talented people, but until their local and federal governments start observing and enforcing the rule of law, it's going to remain one of the shittiest countries to live in.
- saganus 13y ago
  Speaking as someone who lives in a... well, "under-developed" country to be pollitically correct, I can say that even when you expect shit like this to happen and are even prepared for it, there's certainly no way to make it better if no one complains or says anything. At least the author seems to be making an effort to rise above this "shit that happens". How? by studying and working hard to be able to get a shot at, either leaving the country, achieving a better quality of life (i.e. more money, whenever money does make things better, which is certainly not all things) and/or by complaining and raising flags about this and hoping that enough fuss will make some poeple move their asses and change things.
- pcx66 13y ago
  > People in India don't even have the reasonable expectation of riding a public bus without getting raped to death That was very, very offensive. Are you an Indian? or at the least been to India? My mother has been using public transport for 25 years (now traveling upto 150Kms for her job). She never had a problem. Show some data and or shut up your arrogant mouth.
  - harlanlewis 13y ago
    I think he's referring to a recent spate of rapes in India that received a lot of exposure in the US press. TIME just posted an article about high-profile gang rape in India a couple days ago: http://world.time.com/2013/09/02/india-fury-over-gang-rapes-sign-of-changing-nation/ http://world.time.com/2013/09/02/india-fury-over-gang-rapes-...
saganus 13y ago
How the art of reading articles was ruined for me: By using pt 8 fonts...
- anuragramdasan 13y ago
  Sorry about putting you through that. Will fix it. Ctrl+ for now please? :)
  - saganus 13y ago
    Hahaha. Yes, actually Ctrl + mouse wheel up. I just couldn't stop myself from taking a shot at the title. My apologies. I never meant it to be serious. :) Btw, the subject in the text is indeed interesting and disheartening at the same time.
    - anuragramdasan 13y ago
      Haha. No its okay. UI sucks, you didn't like it. That is fine. No need to apologize. I am a CSS handicap. :/ Yes indeed it is disheartening. It is a magnificent book(from what I've read till now) and its a shame to see Dr. Knuths efforts being so badly treated.
- jadyoyster 13y ago
  Just curious, how come you don't have a minimum font size set up? I never run into this problem due to having done so, but I see a lot of people complaining about it...
  - hollerith 13y ago
    Maybe it is just because my eyes are worse than yours, my monitor has more pixels per inch or I keep my face farther away from the monitor than you do, but when I set a minimum font size, I want to set it to a value large enough to break some sites. (By "break" I mean the text runs off the right side of the screen or overflows into other elements.) But then there is no way to work around the breakage without tediously going back into preferences or about:config, lowering the minimum font size, then raising it again when I am done with the problematic site. In other words, the reason I do not set a minimum font size is that Firefox treats the minimum font size as a hard limit to be observed even when the user explicitly asks to reduce the size of the text (which, again, I would need to do whenever the site does not render sanely at my preferred font size). So I find myself increasing the size of the text many, many times a day. At least recent versions of Firefox allow me to add to the navigation toolbar a "[-|+]" widget that lets me increment or decrement the size with one click. Also, Firefox often remembers the text size for the next time I visit the same site. Hope that answers your question. I seem to recall a few sites' breaking (becoming difficult to navigate or fathom) if the text size is even slightly larger than the default size set by the site, so I am curious as to why you do not have that problem. (I seem to recall Amazon or Ebay being one such site.)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 13y ago
>My biggest concern was that if in the future I end up buying a new book, how can I be sure it is the same book that I expected to be delivered, without any page messups or other oddities. Just buy the American edition, problem solved.
- anuragramdasan 13y ago
  Kind of beats the point of having regional editions so that users can get books at a reasonable price, doesn't it?
  - mtdewcmu 13y ago
    Is there any way you could find it at a library?
    - anuragramdasan 13y ago
      Libraries usually keep Indian editions of the book. I haven't checked for TAOCP but that was atleast the case with Kernighan and Ritchie.
      - mtdewcmu 13y ago
        Do you have access to a university library? One thing about Knuth -- he gets cited a lot, so I figure I'll absorb some of the choicest parts without having to go to the source. I have to admire your ambition to just charge through it.
        anuragramdasan 13y ago
        Its actually a fun read once you start approaching it sequentially. I haven't read all of it yet, but whatever I have read, its been interesting and not that difficult.
  - ilyanep 13y ago
    It sucks. They make cheap [x] so that more people can afford to buy [x] for a lot of values of [x], and sometimes the cheap version just doesn't live up to what you want.
reikonomusha 13y ago
Like others here, as soon as I read the first couple of sentences, I mostly expected the result. I paid about $150 for my volumes, and while it was more than I wanted to spend, that's actually quite a deal. That comes out to less than $40 per book, and each book is so dense and authoritative that another equivalent book probably costs on the order of $100. In other words, at least in the USA, if each book was sold separately as textbooks, I wouldn't be surprised if it cost $400 in total. As you have detailed, Knuth's work here is seminal, and he will probably continue writing until the end of his life (and TAoCP won't be completed by him). If you intend to truly read and understand all of the material he has presented, then you're in it for the long run. Unless you are very educated or a researcher in the field, this is probably years worth of work. This includes reading all the mathematics, understanding it, and doing the exercises. (Of course, not all exercises can be reasonably done by anyone, as some of them are actually open research problems.) Because you'd be in it for the long run, cheap paper copies are a bad idea, unless you don't mind pages falling out and deteriorating. Doing a semester-long course in some subject? Okay, that's fine. But purchasing for personal reasons the opus magnum of one of the greatest computer scientists? That feels a little different. Although you've already paid a measly one-tenth of the price already, I'd consider paying the full price, and take your first as just a tax on the lesson learned. In the USA, many of us would get a 5-10% markup anyway (sales tax), so it's not all that devastating. Edit/Addendum: Lastly, one important thing. For anyone reading this comment: While there is prestige in finding errors, that should not even be remotely close to the reason you purchase the books. The checks, in their original intent, are small awards for finding mistakes, and only somewhat artificially have they turned into something more. The true reward, as cliché as this sounds, is being able to read Knuth's prose and learning from it. If you believe that having such an achievement will slingshot you ahead in business or academia, this is almost surely false. While the award is nice to get, it won't give you much in return. I own two checks, and they're on my résumé, but I don't think they've carried much weight, if at all, at the multitude of companies I've applied for and been at. I think I've been asked about them only once, and even that time, the interviewer wasn't interested in hearing about numerical algorithms or boolean satisfaction.
- pmiller2 13y ago
  Regarding the exercises, I think it's pretty reasonable to do everything up to difficulty 25/M25 (even HM25 if you have the background), plus one or 2 between 30-40 per section. If you do that, you'll make progress at a reasonable pace and probably get about as much as you practically can out of it.
eigenvalue 13y ago
The most upsetting part about this is that some of Knuth's valuable and limited mental energy was wasted because of some idiot publishers trying to make a buck and being sloppy.
- emiliobumachar 13y ago
  Most likely much time. The unique part of this case was blogging about it. There's a whole bunch of those books out there.
damianknz 13y ago
Don't let the page numbering ruin these books for you as the contents will provide you enjoyment for the rest of your life. Its great that you were able to get your own copy of them. At university in New Zealand TAOCP was on the recommended reading list for CompSci but the library only had one of each volume. You could only get them out for _3 hours_ at a time. Years later I was in a bookstore with my girlfriend a the time and I saw the 3 volume set for _$NZ 500_. She secretly went back the next day and brought them for me for my birthday. We are now married.
- chetanahuja 13y ago
  She's a keeper.
tzs 13y ago
Those "reprint editions" could actually be useful. Consider the section of Volume II called "How Fast Can We Multiply?" (or something close to that). That section has undergone major changes for each edition. The current edition is fine if you just want to know the best answer (as of the time that edition was written). However, if you also read the earlier two editions, you will get a deeper understanding of the material.
losethos 13y ago
Holy C is a new language. if (13<=age<20) "Teenager\n"; else "Not Teenager\n";
susi22 13y ago
Offtopic: Concrete Mathematics is the best book I've ever read. If you have a chance get it. It requires very very little pre knowledge of math.
- icelancer 13y ago
  I searched it on Amazon and saw numerous reviews saying you need a strong grasp of discrete mathematics, which is hardly "very very little" knowledge of math. I didn't study serious discrete math until my upper classes in undergraduate school.
  - Grue3 13y ago
    I can confirm that it's pretty math heavy. I was considered a math genius in my school and I was having trouble with the later chapters.
    - susi22 13y ago
      Yes, the later chapters are tough. But I'd definitely say you don't need much preliminary discrete math in the first couple chapters. Let's say up to chapter 6 (Special Numbers)
egl2001 13y ago
The books you have are just fine. The books were high quality when they first came out. Thousands of us studied the first printings without ill effects. Besides, you have the opportunity to test your reading by looking for errors. Just relax and enjoy a masterpiece.
kamaal 13y ago
This is really strange. Low price editions, or LPE's are the best things to have happened to Indian students. Without them I couldn't have cleared my engineering exams. And I have never faced problems like these in the past nor do I remember any body among my friends report such problems. In fact we only have praise for LPE's. I am wondering if this is like a one-off goofup on the part of the publisher. Which it can very likely be. And the price has nothing to do with it, basically because eventually everyone realizes that only thing that results from high prices is piracy. So you might as well sell at a decent price which customers are ready to pay.
nsomaru 13y ago
so where would be a good source of quality books in India?
- anuragramdasan 13y ago
  As of now, I order books mostly over Amazon. They ship the 'real' edition. Its expensive but that's better than the other alternative. Also, I never claimed all the Indian books are flawed. You wouldn't know until you buy one. Your best bet would be to check one out from a library, use it, figure it out for yourself and then decide whether to buy an Indian edition or the real one.
  - nsomaru 13y ago
    Thanks for the Amazon recommendation. I am an expat (repat?) living in rural India and do not have access to libraries.
brownbat 13y ago
This goes beyond foreign versions of textbooks. A friend recently recommended "The Broken Sword" by Poul Anderson. The trouble is, the text of the 1954 work was watered down in 1971. So it's apparently important to read the right edition, or so Michael Moorcock warns. [1] I've had small online booksellers assure me they have the edition I want. When I open the package in the mail, it's never the right version. When I contact the merchant to ask how I can find the right edition, they just refund my money and stop talking to me. Other sales people have told me they have no warehouse access, they have no way to confirm what's getting in the boxes. The easiest way for them to find out the edition of a book is to just ship it to me and have me let them know. You'd think you could have a meaningful discussion with a bookseller about editions. I know it's not something that matters for every sale, but you'd think at least those few who choose to deal in books would occasionally notice that not all books with the same title look identical, and start to wonder why. We've moved from a world where I can put my hands on a book, glance at the copyright page, feel the paper, see the condition, to one where every version of a work, from annotated to abridged, can be lumped together as a fungible commodity. I know, Bezos moves a lot of paper, this isn't going to keep him up at night. But if I get one "old man yells at clouds" rant, this goes in mine. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/25/featuresreviews.guardianreview18 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/25/featuresreviews...
- piqufoh 13y ago
  There's a (not so small) online bookseller with the version you're after http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Broken-Sword-Fantasy-Masterworks/dp/0575082720 http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Broken-Sword-Fantasy-Masterworks... Apparently the Gollancz Fantasy-Masterworks versions are true to the 1954 version.
  - brownbat 13y ago
    My latest attempt was with one of the booksellers on Amazon claiming to have that edition. I sort of gave up on the site after that fell through. I'll give the .co.uk version a try, thanks.
EzGraphs 13y ago
We've moved from a world where I can put my hands on a book, glance at the copyright page, feel the paper, see the condition, to one where every version of a work, from annotated to abridged, can be lumped together as a fungible commodity. Yes - really a rather profound change. The entire way new books are produced has changed as a result as well. Print-on-demand in particular can result in you literally having a "one-off" edition of a book. The benefit is quicker integration of corrections. Am not sure we really fully understand some of the negative consequences...
talkingquickly 13y ago
Slightly off topic but can anyone recommend a good book on algebra to get back up to speed before attempting to read these?
- treerex 13y ago
  "Concrete Mathematics" by Graham, Knuth and Patashnik is probably the best preparation for tackling TAoCP, though it is not light reading either. You could also look at "Mathematics for Computer Science" by Lehman, Leighton, and Meyer. It is available at http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/fall10/mcs-ftl.pdf http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/fall10/mcs-ftl.pdf .
  - talkingquickly 13y ago
    Perfect, many thanks.
anonyblahblah 13y ago
I always say that pirating games and films was simply better in every way than paying for them. Better quality, support, more convenient formats, minus the DRM. My conscience has been hardened by all the times i have been screwed over by crippling DRM when using something I have paid for. Pirated versions, of course have this removed for you. Sadly, It seems the same is beginning to apply to books as well. Publishers should take heed of this unless they want to follow the fate of music and movie industries.

194 points by anuragramdasan 13y ago

ExpiredLink 13y ago

The fonts on this page are too large. Make them smaller!

sukuriant 13y ago
And zooming in does not make a left-right scroll bar. That's what I had to do to read it. That font is really, really tiny on my 1900 x 1200 screen
- anuragramdasan 13y ago
  Eeek, sorry. Fixing it at the moment. :)
- CapitalistCartr 13y ago
  "Control +" is your friend.
  - sukuriant 13y ago
    That's what I did; but it's still a poor, customized-beyond defaults, resolution. I'm curious to load that page in high DPI mode for users with vision impairments and see if it increases in size.
markbernard 13y ago
Fonts are not too large. The base font on any web page should be 16point.

deletes 13y ago

Imagine getting a Xeroxed copy of the illegal version of the book.

pmiller2 13y ago
Lions' commentary on Unix was passed around for years like this before it was allowed to be officially published. There's a grand tradition of samizdat in academia for stuff like this (mostly pre-prints, though).
- deletes 13y ago
  I was hinting at the latest Xerox fiasco. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238

peterkelly 13y ago

There's a reason why the version you bought was Rs 400, not Rs 5000. That much of a price differential should be a red flag.

anuragramdasan 13y ago
Actually almost all the Indian editions of the book are much more cheaper than its US based price in Dollars. And when you look at the paper quality, it feels like the price is justified. Also not to look over the fact that both are published by PearsonEd. The US version by Addison-Wesley and the Indian version by Dorling-Kindersley. Both are PearsonEd subsidiaries.
- pmiller2 13y ago
  Indeed. My current copy of CLRS3 is a like-new Eastern Economy Edition paperback. I paid $20 or $30 for it off Amazon versus $92 list price or $55 on Amazon for the hardcover, and I considered that to be a good deal.
  - anuragramdasan 13y ago
    Yes. CLRS I had ordered almost the same time as TAOCP and although I was skeptical at the beginning, I was surprised that it was a good edition. The biggest problem is though, once we've bought the Indian edition, we wont buy the original edition(obviously). This makes it difficult for us to gauge how much off the edition we own is from the original one.
    - pmiller2 13y ago
      I used the Eastern Economy Edition version of CLRS2 in a course I was taking. I never found a difference other than page numbering (which was accurately reflected in the index and table of contents), so I think you're okay on that one. :-)
  - LeonidasXIV 13y ago
    I paid 2€ for CLRS2 when my library threw it out. In pretty good condition, hard cover. Possibly the best deal I ever made.

JimmaDaRustla 13y ago

Makes a good case for advancing digital versions of text books...

anuragramdasan 13y ago
Probably. But still printed books are going to be the most widely used approach and giving such a treatment to education related books are never good for students.
reikonomusha 13y ago
If there is any book that you should get in paper form, it is TAoCP. This is one book where the author has taken great care, and decades of work, to truly build the book from the ground up. The book, the fonts, and the style were developed for paper. Knuth even has 5 other volumes of books containing the instructions and source code to reproduce almost every single curve, stroke, and space you see in the books. I think advocating digital publishing is probably good, but not for all things. Books shouldn't be treated as source code with continuous deployment. Even one word on one page can massively restructure the rest of the document, making it extremely difficult to coordinate and fix. What I think should be fixed is the dissemination of authentic books at a reasonable price, for especially students who typically don't have much money at all.
- pmiller2 13y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly with this. As an owner of all 4 volumes currently out, I have to say I enjoy everything about these books, except for the choice of MIX as the programming language. :P
- jpatokal 13y ago
  Don't forget the typesetting: Knuth wrote TeX because he was unhappy with the alternatives.
  - billforsternz 13y ago
    He didn't forget the typesetting. He (the parent) was basically writing about the typesetting.

phaus 13y ago

I honestly don't understand how you can live in India and expect shit like this not to happen. People in India don't even have the reasonable expectation of riding a public bus without getting raped to death, how cold you possibly expect the authorities to care about counterfeit books? India is a beautiful place, with lots of brilliant, talented people, but until their local and federal governments start observing and enforcing the rule of law, it's going to remain one of the shittiest countries to live in.

saganus 13y ago
Speaking as someone who lives in a... well, "under-developed" country to be pollitically correct, I can say that even when you expect shit like this to happen and are even prepared for it, there's certainly no way to make it better if no one complains or says anything. At least the author seems to be making an effort to rise above this "shit that happens". How? by studying and working hard to be able to get a shot at, either leaving the country, achieving a better quality of life (i.e. more money, whenever money does make things better, which is certainly not all things) and/or by complaining and raising flags about this and hoping that enough fuss will make some poeple move their asses and change things.
pcx66 13y ago
> People in India don't even have the reasonable expectation of riding a public bus without getting raped to death That was very, very offensive. Are you an Indian? or at the least been to India? My mother has been using public transport for 25 years (now traveling upto 150Kms for her job). She never had a problem. Show some data and or shut up your arrogant mouth.
- harlanlewis 13y ago
  I think he's referring to a recent spate of rapes in India that received a lot of exposure in the US press. TIME just posted an article about high-profile gang rape in India a couple days ago: http://world.time.com/2013/09/02/india-fury-over-gang-rapes-sign-of-changing-nation/ http://world.time.com/2013/09/02/india-fury-over-gang-rapes-...

saganus 13y ago

How the art of reading articles was ruined for me: By using pt 8 fonts...

anuragramdasan 13y ago
Sorry about putting you through that. Will fix it. Ctrl+ for now please? :)
- saganus 13y ago
  Hahaha. Yes, actually Ctrl + mouse wheel up. I just couldn't stop myself from taking a shot at the title. My apologies. I never meant it to be serious. :) Btw, the subject in the text is indeed interesting and disheartening at the same time.
  - anuragramdasan 13y ago
    Haha. No its okay. UI sucks, you didn't like it. That is fine. No need to apologize. I am a CSS handicap. :/ Yes indeed it is disheartening. It is a magnificent book(from what I've read till now) and its a shame to see Dr. Knuths efforts being so badly treated.
jadyoyster 13y ago
Just curious, how come you don't have a minimum font size set up? I never run into this problem due to having done so, but I see a lot of people complaining about it...
- hollerith 13y ago
  Maybe it is just because my eyes are worse than yours, my monitor has more pixels per inch or I keep my face farther away from the monitor than you do, but when I set a minimum font size, I want to set it to a value large enough to break some sites. (By "break" I mean the text runs off the right side of the screen or overflows into other elements.) But then there is no way to work around the breakage without tediously going back into preferences or about:config, lowering the minimum font size, then raising it again when I am done with the problematic site. In other words, the reason I do not set a minimum font size is that Firefox treats the minimum font size as a hard limit to be observed even when the user explicitly asks to reduce the size of the text (which, again, I would need to do whenever the site does not render sanely at my preferred font size). So I find myself increasing the size of the text many, many times a day. At least recent versions of Firefox allow me to add to the navigation toolbar a "[-|+]" widget that lets me increment or decrement the size with one click. Also, Firefox often remembers the text size for the next time I visit the same site. Hope that answers your question. I seem to recall a few sites' breaking (becoming difficult to navigate or fathom) if the text size is even slightly larger than the default size set by the site, so I am curious as to why you do not have that problem. (I seem to recall Amazon or Ebay being one such site.)

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

coldtea 13y ago

>My biggest concern was that if in the future I end up buying a new book, how can I be sure it is the same book that I expected to be delivered, without any page messups or other oddities. Just buy the American edition, problem solved.

anuragramdasan 13y ago
Kind of beats the point of having regional editions so that users can get books at a reasonable price, doesn't it?
- mtdewcmu 13y ago
  Is there any way you could find it at a library?
  - anuragramdasan 13y ago
    Libraries usually keep Indian editions of the book. I haven't checked for TAOCP but that was atleast the case with Kernighan and Ritchie.
    - mtdewcmu 13y ago
      Do you have access to a university library? One thing about Knuth -- he gets cited a lot, so I figure I'll absorb some of the choicest parts without having to go to the source. I have to admire your ambition to just charge through it.
      - anuragramdasan 13y ago
        Its actually a fun read once you start approaching it sequentially. I haven't read all of it yet, but whatever I have read, its been interesting and not that difficult.
- ilyanep 13y ago
  It sucks. They make cheap [x] so that more people can afford to buy [x] for a lot of values of [x], and sometimes the cheap version just doesn't live up to what you want.

reikonomusha 13y ago

Like others here, as soon as I read the first couple of sentences, I mostly expected the result. I paid about $150 for my volumes, and while it was more than I wanted to spend, that's actually quite a deal. That comes out to less than $40 per book, and each book is so dense and authoritative that another equivalent book probably costs on the order of $100. In other words, at least in the USA, if each book was sold separately as textbooks, I wouldn't be surprised if it cost $400 in total. As you have detailed, Knuth's work here is seminal, and he will probably continue writing until the end of his life (and TAoCP won't be completed by him). If you intend to truly read and understand all of the material he has presented, then you're in it for the long run. Unless you are very educated or a researcher in the field, this is probably years worth of work. This includes reading all the mathematics, understanding it, and doing the exercises. (Of course, not all exercises can be reasonably done by anyone, as some of them are actually open research problems.) Because you'd be in it for the long run, cheap paper copies are a bad idea, unless you don't mind pages falling out and deteriorating. Doing a semester-long course in some subject? Okay, that's fine. But purchasing for personal reasons the opus magnum of one of the greatest computer scientists? That feels a little different. Although you've already paid a measly one-tenth of the price already, I'd consider paying the full price, and take your first as just a tax on the lesson learned. In the USA, many of us would get a 5-10% markup anyway (sales tax), so it's not all that devastating. Edit/Addendum: Lastly, one important thing. For anyone reading this comment: While there is prestige in finding errors, that should not even be remotely close to the reason you purchase the books. The checks, in their original intent, are small awards for finding mistakes, and only somewhat artificially have they turned into something more. The true reward, as cliché as this sounds, is being able to read Knuth's prose and learning from it. If you believe that having such an achievement will slingshot you ahead in business or academia, this is almost surely false. While the award is nice to get, it won't give you much in return. I own two checks, and they're on my résumé, but I don't think they've carried much weight, if at all, at the multitude of companies I've applied for and been at. I think I've been asked about them only once, and even that time, the interviewer wasn't interested in hearing about numerical algorithms or boolean satisfaction.

pmiller2 13y ago
Regarding the exercises, I think it's pretty reasonable to do everything up to difficulty 25/M25 (even HM25 if you have the background), plus one or 2 between 30-40 per section. If you do that, you'll make progress at a reasonable pace and probably get about as much as you practically can out of it.

eigenvalue 13y ago

The most upsetting part about this is that some of Knuth's valuable and limited mental energy was wasted because of some idiot publishers trying to make a buck and being sloppy.

emiliobumachar 13y ago
Most likely much time. The unique part of this case was blogging about it. There's a whole bunch of those books out there.

damianknz 13y ago

Don't let the page numbering ruin these books for you as the contents will provide you enjoyment for the rest of your life. Its great that you were able to get your own copy of them. At university in New Zealand TAOCP was on the recommended reading list for CompSci but the library only had one of each volume. You could only get them out for _3 hours_ at a time. Years later I was in a bookstore with my girlfriend a the time and I saw the 3 volume set for _$NZ 500_. She secretly went back the next day and brought them for me for my birthday. We are now married.

chetanahuja 13y ago
She's a keeper.

tzs 13y ago

Those "reprint editions" could actually be useful. Consider the section of Volume II called "How Fast Can We Multiply?" (or something close to that). That section has undergone major changes for each edition. The current edition is fine if you just want to know the best answer (as of the time that edition was written). However, if you also read the earlier two editions, you will get a deeper understanding of the material.

losethos 13y ago

Holy C is a new language. if (13<=age<20) "Teenager\n"; else "Not Teenager\n";

susi22 13y ago

Offtopic: Concrete Mathematics is the best book I've ever read. If you have a chance get it. It requires very very little pre knowledge of math.

icelancer 13y ago
I searched it on Amazon and saw numerous reviews saying you need a strong grasp of discrete mathematics, which is hardly "very very little" knowledge of math. I didn't study serious discrete math until my upper classes in undergraduate school.
- Grue3 13y ago
  I can confirm that it's pretty math heavy. I was considered a math genius in my school and I was having trouble with the later chapters.
  - susi22 13y ago
    Yes, the later chapters are tough. But I'd definitely say you don't need much preliminary discrete math in the first couple chapters. Let's say up to chapter 6 (Special Numbers)

egl2001 13y ago

The books you have are just fine. The books were high quality when they first came out. Thousands of us studied the first printings without ill effects. Besides, you have the opportunity to test your reading by looking for errors. Just relax and enjoy a masterpiece.

kamaal 13y ago

This is really strange. Low price editions, or LPE's are the best things to have happened to Indian students. Without them I couldn't have cleared my engineering exams. And I have never faced problems like these in the past nor do I remember any body among my friends report such problems. In fact we only have praise for LPE's. I am wondering if this is like a one-off goofup on the part of the publisher. Which it can very likely be. And the price has nothing to do with it, basically because eventually everyone realizes that only thing that results from high prices is piracy. So you might as well sell at a decent price which customers are ready to pay.

nsomaru 13y ago

so where would be a good source of quality books in India?

anuragramdasan 13y ago
As of now, I order books mostly over Amazon. They ship the 'real' edition. Its expensive but that's better than the other alternative. Also, I never claimed all the Indian books are flawed. You wouldn't know until you buy one. Your best bet would be to check one out from a library, use it, figure it out for yourself and then decide whether to buy an Indian edition or the real one.
- nsomaru 13y ago
  Thanks for the Amazon recommendation. I am an expat (repat?) living in rural India and do not have access to libraries.

brownbat 13y ago

This goes beyond foreign versions of textbooks. A friend recently recommended "The Broken Sword" by Poul Anderson. The trouble is, the text of the 1954 work was watered down in 1971. So it's apparently important to read the right edition, or so Michael Moorcock warns. [1] I've had small online booksellers assure me they have the edition I want. When I open the package in the mail, it's never the right version. When I contact the merchant to ask how I can find the right edition, they just refund my money and stop talking to me. Other sales people have told me they have no warehouse access, they have no way to confirm what's getting in the boxes. The easiest way for them to find out the edition of a book is to just ship it to me and have me let them know. You'd think you could have a meaningful discussion with a bookseller about editions. I know it's not something that matters for every sale, but you'd think at least those few who choose to deal in books would occasionally notice that not all books with the same title look identical, and start to wonder why. We've moved from a world where I can put my hands on a book, glance at the copyright page, feel the paper, see the condition, to one where every version of a work, from annotated to abridged, can be lumped together as a fungible commodity. I know, Bezos moves a lot of paper, this isn't going to keep him up at night. But if I get one "old man yells at clouds" rant, this goes in mine. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/25/featuresreviews.guardianreview18 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/25/featuresreviews...

piqufoh 13y ago
There's a (not so small) online bookseller with the version you're after http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Broken-Sword-Fantasy-Masterworks/dp/0575082720 http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Broken-Sword-Fantasy-Masterworks... Apparently the Gollancz Fantasy-Masterworks versions are true to the 1954 version.
- brownbat 13y ago
  My latest attempt was with one of the booksellers on Amazon claiming to have that edition. I sort of gave up on the site after that fell through. I'll give the .co.uk version a try, thanks.

EzGraphs 13y ago

We've moved from a world where I can put my hands on a book, glance at the copyright page, feel the paper, see the condition, to one where every version of a work, from annotated to abridged, can be lumped together as a fungible commodity. Yes - really a rather profound change. The entire way new books are produced has changed as a result as well. Print-on-demand in particular can result in you literally having a "one-off" edition of a book. The benefit is quicker integration of corrections. Am not sure we really fully understand some of the negative consequences...

talkingquickly 13y ago

Slightly off topic but can anyone recommend a good book on algebra to get back up to speed before attempting to read these?

treerex 13y ago
"Concrete Mathematics" by Graham, Knuth and Patashnik is probably the best preparation for tackling TAoCP, though it is not light reading either. You could also look at "Mathematics for Computer Science" by Lehman, Leighton, and Meyer. It is available at http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/fall10/mcs-ftl.pdf http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/fall10/mcs-ftl.pdf .
- talkingquickly 13y ago
  Perfect, many thanks.

anonyblahblah 13y ago

I always say that pirating games and films was simply better in every way than paying for them. Better quality, support, more convenient formats, minus the DRM. My conscience has been hardened by all the times i have been screwed over by crippling DRM when using something I have paid for. Pirated versions, of course have this removed for you. Sadly, It seems the same is beginning to apply to books as well. Publishers should take heed of this unless they want to follow the fate of music and movie industries.