7 ms·
The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth
- almaya 2mo agoI am curious how good are the frontier LLM at recollecting reliably facts and proofs from these books.
- philips 2mo agoWhere can the books be found in PDFs for purchase?! First time I have heard of a non paperback novel. Obviously I know I can probably find them on the high seas.
- ndr 2mo agoFrom TFA: > The authorized PDF versions can be purchased at www.informit.com/taocp
- philips 2mo agoHa. Thank you! Strange it is only from one store.
- disgruntledphd2 2mo agoThey're really good quality though (even if they are very expensive).
- philips 2mo agoDo they have wide margins like a printing or tight margins for tablets?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- disgruntledphd2 2mo agoI can't remember right now, will check when I'm back at my home device.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- jagged-chisel 2mo agoAbout $340 for the full set of eBooks. Also: "Please do not tell me about errors that you find in an eBook, whether it's PDF or not, unless the same errors are present in a printed copy; such mistakes should be reported directly to the publisher." Glad he thought to mention this, but I suspect his inbox will still be inundated.
- fmajid 2mo agoHe doesn't have an inbox: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
- jjav 2mo ago"Inbox" used to be literally the box/tray on your desk where people would leave work for you in written letters. That's where email got the term. Amusingly in my first job in the 90s they still assigned each desk a labeled inbox and an outbox (two trays on the desk), but by then it was all email already so nobody ever used those on my desk. But they sat there for a few years as a memento to the 80s!
- WillAdams 2mo agoE-mails which are sent in about the various books used to be printed out and responded to --- I got a $2.88 physical reward check for finding an error and a point of improvement in _Digital Typography_. Not sure how they are handled now. Trying to find an error or point of improvement in v4f7 so that I can get an account at: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html (usually, I do find errors in books, esp. e-books, which reminds me, I need to pick up the corrected 3rd printing of _The Fall of Arthur_ by J.R.R. Tolkien before I read it again, since that should have the error I found corrected).
- fmajid 2mo agoYes, that article has an email for TAOCP corrections, that are processed by his secretary.
- TheChaplain 2mo agoI am not a believer, but pray that whichever $DEITY is watching over Donald Knuth allows him a healthy and long life to reach the achievement of finishing volume 7.
- Pet_Ant 2mo agoWhat he needs to do is start sketching the rest so that it can be finished after his death in his vision.
- myst 2mo agoThere’s no second Don Knuth vOv
- disgruntledphd2 2mo agoBrandon Sanderson maybe?
- y1n0 2mo agoDamn funny comment.
- murphyslaw 2mo agoIf the end product is something like La Sagrada Familia, I'll pass.
- kps 2mo agoI think there's a proof that he can at best asymptotically approach volume 7.
- wolfi1 2mo agobut what distraction could it be now? There seems to be nothing to be done for TeX
- small_model 2mo agoDon't feed the pdfs into Fable, compile a email of errors -> Knuth
- sourdecor 2mo agoI really like the books listed in the link to American Scientist's book recommendations[0] on that page. [0]: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/100-or-so-books-that-shaped-a-century-of-science https://www.americanscientist.org/article/100-or-so-books-th...
- ocd 2mo agoI'm sure most of it is above my head, but I purchased the entire set in a mispricing for approximately ~$40 some time ago, and I'm really happy to have it in my library.
- wkoszek 2mo agoMany people do, yet when I open it from time to time and read through some sections, it can be a lot of fun
- laichzeit0 2mo agoI wonder how many of the problems he lists on https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html could be solved/checked with something like Fable at this point.
- nickpeterson 2mo agoIt feels like something anthropic or OpenAI would pounce on for marketing clout
- zerr 2mo agoThe valuable prose aside, I never liked that code examples were in a pseudo assembly language.
- commandlinefan 2mo agoThere are M/MIX assemblers and interpreters you can download and run - in some ways they're better than "real" programming languages because they're explicitly for instruction so usability concerns like package managers and build automation support don't get in "the way" of operating them.
- convolvatron 2mo agoconsider the alternatives. it could have been written in PL-1 and rapidly become dated. or it could have been written in a slightly higher level custom language and that would also have to be taught and would be less clear about what was going on under the hood. or a kind of pseudo-code that would also admit ambiguity. or it could have been rewritten in pascal, and then java, and then javascript and then rust. given the timespan and the focus on complete analysis of running times and not just asymptotics, in the end maybe it wasn't so terrible a choice.
- jcranmer 2mo agoWell, even as-is, it turns out that the kind of assembly language that Knuth originally wrote it in itself had a very short lifespan. MIX assumes a single accumulator register for arithmetic, which hasn't been a common processor architecture since around the 1980s. MMIX is redesigned to be more RISC, but it also uses a dynamic register window concept (which itself I think was only used on Itanium, and we all know how that architecture went down). And unfortunately, for a lot of modern algorithms, you're going to have dive into SIMD-like algorithms, something MMIX doesn't have. Also, a lot of modern processors have a decent suite of bitwise operations (e.g., count leading/trailing zeros/ones, popcount) that is also missing from MMIX. The programming languages that are in favor may change from decade to decade, but so to does most of the assembly language techniques.
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- klik99 2mo agoAfter years of dipping into random chapters for reference I read through the first 2.5 volumes sequentially until life got too busy. I plan on gifting the current full set to myself this xmas- but even if you just dip into it like a coffee table book it’s a wonderful read that breaks up tough sections with humor.
- WillAdams 2mo agoFor a fun joke, check the index entry for "Royalties, use of" --- it points to a graph which is evocative of the layout of the pipe organ in his home which was funded by TAoCP book sales.
- murphyslaw 2mo agoProctologist General's warning: DO NOT PLACE IN RESTROOM.
- jdnier 2mo agoFrom Future Plans... > And after Volumes 1--5 are done, God willing, I plan to publish Volume 6 (the theory of context-free languages) and Volume 7 (Compiler techniques), but only if the things I want to say about those topics are still relevant and still haven't been said. Volumes 1--5 represent the central core of computer programming for sequential machines; the subjects of Volumes 6 and 7 are important but more specialized.
- jdnier 2mo agoAnd about Volume 5... > Syntactic Algorithms, in preparation. 9. Lexical scanning (includes also string search and data compression) 10. Parsing techniques
- jll29 2mo agoNot to forget he was asked specifically to write a book about compilers (= "Volume 7") by Addison Wesley in the 1960s. Now, half a century later, he is chickening out...
- dolmen 2mo agoLatest Knuth preprint: "Fillomino Densities", dated 2026-07-01 From a previous preprint titled "Claude’s Cycle", dated 2026-02-28 [2]: It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving. I’ll try to tell the story briefly in this note. [1] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/fillomino-densities.pdf https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/fillomino-... [2] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cyc...
- mathattack 2mo agoAnd he closes [2] with “May the force be with you” Very interesting that he seems to be in the camp of “It’s ok if the machines prove it as long as we can understand and formally verify it after.”
- jll29 2mo agoReceiving one of Don's cheques ("Bank of San Serif" ;-) a few months after pointing out an error has been many a computer scientist's career highlight!
- syncsynchalt 2mo agoCongrats! I have two, both for the much easier task of doing bibliographic work for the books.
- jzer0cool 2mo agoLet C, chapters V, volumes W, words Is Knuth producing V, optimally and asymptomatically approaches O(n)? Explain. If not O(n) the explain how to approach or better.
- vivzkestrel 2mo ago35000 Rs for these books?????????????? are you serious? you could buy groceries for 6 months on that price
- tmtvl 2mo agoBut you can read the books as often as you want as long as you live and pass them on to your children and your children's children,... Educational books are an investment in the future, and some (like Euclid's Elements) don't ever lose their relevance.
- vivzkestrel 2mo agoit is the equivalent of those books costing 10000$ for you
- tmtvl 2mo agoThat's admittedly expensive, DuckDuckGo converted it to around 450 USD, so that seemed more reasonable.
- vivzkestrel 2mo ago- what i am trying to say is if you take purchasing power parity into account and look at the costs, the books cost a bomb. - i could buy a laptop at the price of the books being sold here. it is just tooo much. - the author needs to take PPP into account and price accordingly similar to how steam does it - i could get a really good meal for 500 rs at a good restaurant here - the cost of the book is close to 80 such meals - if we price it in your currency assuming 100$ for a really decent meal, the author is charging 8000$ for the books