The Art of Computer Programming Reading Group | Hacker News Reader

The Art of Computer Programming Reading Group

ibiblio.org

15 pointsloboman9 comments

Reading group from 2005. The author comments:

Not surprisingly, after a very short period of time, this fell to the wayside. The page and schedule are left up for anyone who has interest in their own push through TAoCP.

Anybody care to comment on whether the pacing seems appropriate?

I suspect this might have been easier to accomplish without taking on the exercises. I'd try going through the texts first, gaining some understanding, and then follow it up with some serious exercise crunching whenever I felt like it.

That way, I at least gain a theoretical understanding of the stuff - enough to understand what some CS papers talk about.

I recently saw Alex Stepanov quoted recommending TAoCP to his students, saying "It is something that they should keep studying for the rest of their lives." While that might be excessive (volume 3 is still less than 40 years old, right?), I think a year sounds short.

Reading all volumes of TAoCP from cover to cover is probably unnecessary, it's reference material mostly. Also, the pace of "just over 34 pages a week" for such heavy material is insane.

What does it mean to say you "don't have time to get a computer science degree"? Like, have you been diagnosed with a chronic disease? When you go to college you generally want to be "all in," to the extent that often you actually won't have time for a job or for socializing.

My guess would be that it means taking four years off from his career would be seriously detrimental to some other goal, e.g. continuing to feed his family.

I assumed that's what he meant, but I think that's more an issue of not being able to afford to go to college.

Start with this (a more realizable goal):

http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Computer-Science-Language-Inf...

The pace seems too fast to me. Working through some of the exercises should be attempted and these are not your typical textbook exercises.

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