Ask HN: Have you read "The Art of Computer Programming"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8004401

by yashness • 12 years ago

13 20 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

How much time did it take finishing per volume ? How & when should one read this book according to you.

CmonDev• 12 years ago

It's a reference book, not a book to be read from cover to cover.

zura• 12 years ago

Exactly. And when I need to learn some algorithm, I prefer high-level pseudo code rather than low-level pseudo asm.

PaulHoule4• 12 years ago

I read it a long time ago, around 1990. I remember people talking about it a lot in the early 80s

It's a seminal early text, but CS is a fast-changing field so I couldn't recommend it as a primary text for somebody who wants to learn CS today, however, it's definitely fun to flip through.

His stuff on "Searching and Sorting", for instance, just isn't relevant in a day when your language has a sort() function built in and hashtables. Also, in some of the areas I know about in depth, such as random number generation, Knuth's book is dangerously behind the times.

wglb3• 12 years ago

I am curious about your random number generation, Knuth's book is dangerously behind the times.

Can you be specific about how it is behind the times?

PaulHoule4• 12 years ago

I wrote this when I was in grad school:

http://www.honeylocust.com/RngPack/

even in the 1990s there were much better random number generators than anything that Knuth or the Numerical Recipes people talked about (and I'm saying that as somebody who was lucky enough to take a class in Numerical Methods from Saul Teukolsky.)

acuozzo• 12 years ago

just isn't relevant in a day when your language has a sort() function built in and hashtables

You're conflating Computer Science with Computer Programming.

PaulHoule4• 12 years ago

Yes and no.

Frankly it irks me that "computer science" is called a "science" rather than a kind of engineering. There's kind of a suggestion here that "engineering" is lower class and that "science" is something more dignified.

Today if you want to write efficient sorting and searching code you need to either think about very advanced algorithms or you need to think about how to get the best performance out of the memory hierarchy and that is all about having a predictable pattern of branching and memory access. If you are not doing that it is much smarter to use the sort() that came with your language.

A little knowledge really is dangerous. If you write your own half-baked algorithms you're going to waste a lot of time adding bugs and slowing down your code. For instance, if you know a little about cryptography you might invent some cypher which is easy to crack, when really you should focus on using established codes such as A.E.S., 3DES, and Twofish and use them correctly rather than inventing something which the NSA can crack in 10 seconds and a high schooler can do in 10 hours.

On the other hand, there are a lot of algorithms that really are interesting today, particularly those that function over partial orderings such as B.S.P. and transitive closure, dynamic programming (it's really amazing you can compute the Levenstein distance as fast as you can), suffix trees (it's counterintuitive that these can be constructed as fast as they can) or the block sorting that underpins bzip2 (it's amazing you can reconstruct the data from it at all.)

Knuth's books cover ground that has been done to death where you really ought to lean on the standard library.

program• 12 years ago

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Professor Knuth, I've read all of your books." (Steve Jobs)

"You're full of shit," (Don Knuth) [1]

I think that no one in the world, except Knuth, has read the entire TAOCP (joke.)

[1] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Close_Encounters_...

yashness• 12 years ago

Ask HN: Have you read "The Art of Computer Programming"?

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