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Title: Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2: Seminumerical Algorithms (3rd Edition) by Donald Ervin Knuth, Donald Knuth ISBN: 0-201-89684-2 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Pub. Date: 04 November, 1997 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $59.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: OUTDATED, BETTER BOOKS EXIST
Comment: People buy Knuth's books for snob appeal, which is to say that they like to put the 3-book set on their shelves as an advertisement for their own intellegence. What they don't realize is that truly talented individuals will see beyond this kind of cheap PR stunt. "Look, I read Knuth... boy, I must be a genius!"
Donald Knuth obviously has offered extra credit to students who provide him with glowing reviews on amazon. "Oh geeze, this is the best book ever. Bow down and kiss his feet." For all we know, he may even offer a cash reward.
This is just one of those cases where the myth of Knuth has overshadowed reality. Is Knuth well known? Yes. Has Knuth been around forever. Yes. Has knuth published countless articles? Yes. Are his books used in day-to-day coursework on top-ten engineering schools. NO, THEY ARE NOT.
For data structures, most *working* professors would refer you to Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest (or maybe Robert Sedgewick). For scientific computing, most *active researchers* would suggest a book like Michael Heath's. For random numbers, you'd be better off with Kelton and Law's book on simulation. For computer architecture, everyone uses Patterson and Hennessey. See a pattern here?
The truth is that fields mature, and textbooks get better and better. Knuth has decided that it's too much work to stay current; he'd rather stick to 6-bit MIX assembler code and his precious universal truths.
Well, Professor Knuth, I have news for you: there are more recent books out there that do a much better job at stating "universal truths" with the added benefit of being easily readable.
I don't buy the excuse that it's too much work to re-write code examples in different languages. Isn't this what graduate students were made for Prof. Knuth? Hell, you don't even have to pay them that much. Just try not to speak down to them, oh great one.
I also don't buy the excuse that he uses MIX so that the reader can look at the finer details of performance and memory consumption. Isn't this the same man who said that "premature optimization is the root of all evil?" In other words, don't optimize; use a better algorithm. You don't need to look at assembly code to analyze algorithms, O(n) analysis should suffice...at least, it's more of a "universal truth" approach.
By trying to write a complete survey of computer science, Knuth trys to be everything to everyone. In doing so, he does nothing as well as he could have (and certainly not as well as the textbooks currently being used). What he has ended up with is an expensive white elephant, that will look pretty while it collects dust.
Stop making excuses Professor Knuth. Get off your d@mn organ and get back to work.
Rating: 4
Summary: Legendary book
Comment: This book is the bible of coputer programming
It contains algorithms on pseudo-random sequences, algotithms on aritmetic operations on number, matrices ect.
The only drawback of this book is that all algprothms are writeen in MIX - some kind of assembler, that make them hard to read.
Rating: 5
Summary: Fascinating
Comment: Of course this is a classic programming text, but the book is fascinating from a mathematical point as well. The discussion of random number generation is worth the price alone. Also neat is the discussion of why numbers with lower initial digits are 'more common' in practice than those with higher initial digits, a topic I've never seen treated elsewhere.
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Title: Art of Computer Programming, Volume 3: Sorting and Searching (2nd Edition) by Donald Ervin Knuth, Donald Knuth ISBN: 0201896850 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Pub. Date: 24 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $59.99 |
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Title: Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms (3rd Edition) by Donald E. Knuth, Donald Knuth ISBN: 0201896834 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Pub. Date: 07 July, 1997 List Price(USD): $59.99 |
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Title: Introduction to Algorithms, Second Edition by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, Clifford Stein ISBN: 0262032937 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $79.95 |
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Title: Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science (2nd Edition) by Ronald Graham ISBN: 0201558025 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Pub. Date: 28 February, 1994 List Price(USD): $59.99 |
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Title: Data Structures and Algorithms (Addison-Wesley Series in Computer Science and Information Pr) by Alfred V. Aho, John E. Hopcroft, Jeffrey Ullman ISBN: 0201000237 Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 September, 1982 List Price(USD): $57.19 |
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