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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

A long while back I wrote an answer on Stack Overflow to a question that asked "How to read TAOCP?" my answer looked something like this:

- don't read them

- get all the books, put them in a bin bag and shake vigorously with some lumps of coal, to give them that "used" look

- go through the books, underline things at random and make notes (also at random) in the margin such as "how true", or even better "wrong!"

- put books on shelf in office - never look at them again

This has worked for me, though I must admit that Searching & Sorting and stuff about random numbers are pretty good.

I got my copies free from Addison Wesley for doing some book reviews for them - not reviewing Knuth, needless to say!

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I have worked with two programmers who had well-thumbed copies of TAoCP on their shelves which each had actually read (one was the only other person I've met outside of a TeX conference who had a reward check) --- to this day, I've not worked with better devs.

Ah nothing like a DEK post to pull out the old TeX folks on HN.

When I bought the first volume in about 1969, I vowed to read that one, and then each one that followed.

However, that is yet to come to pass.

However, when we at Mark Williams Company writing the floating point routines for the C compiler (https://winworldpc.com/product/mark-williams-letsc/3x), we were heavily reading Chapter 4, particularly on long division.

Also did spend some time in the Random Number generation chapter.

An interesting difference between my 1965 version and the ones published today is that long multi-page foldout in Sorting and Searching showing tape-based merge sort is no longer part of the book.

Hey, I have a question about the Mark Williams Company. I understand it was founded by Aaron Swartz's father. Did he work on the programming? Did Aaron spend time around the office? I'm curious how Aaron first got involved in programming, which I think was probably long after the company.

Aaron was very young during the Mark Williams years. I worked there for six years. I don’t think he visited the office during its heyday. So yes long after MWC.

Thank you! Did his father write code?

Not very much. There were a handful of Waterloo kids that are next level programmers.

I was gifted the new set this last Christmas after losing my old versions in a fire, the fold out pages are there in the latest release.

Edited to add: Amazon often has fake or at least printed with lower quality/cost versions. It was hard to find a real copy of his concrete math book when I was searching. The 'i18n' edition is printed on the cheapest of cheap paper for that book. I suspect that is related. But the fan-out pages are in the sorting volume.

#2 Vol 3 is on the second edition, with the tape merge fanout between pages 338 and 339. So it would be a particular printing that didn't have it.

I double checked my latest volume and it does the foldout. My error

I was mistaken about the foldout. It is in both versions. My error.

I just bought the whole set and just did chapter one, will probably not keep up with doing all the assignments but I indend to at least skim them and get a rough feel to where I can find stuff if I ever need it.

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