How The Art of Computer Programming was ruined for me
anuragramdasan.com
anuragramdasan.com
I paid about $150 for my volumes, and while it was more than I wanted to spend, that's actually quite a deal. That comes out to less than $40 per book, and each book is so dense and authoritative that another equivalent book probably costs on the order of $100. In other words, at least in the USA, if each book was sold separately as textbooks, I wouldn't be surprised if it cost $400 in total.
As you have detailed, Knuth's work here is seminal, and he will probably continue writing until the end of his life (and TAoCP won't be completed by him). If you intend to truly read and understand all of the material he has presented, then you're in it for the long run. Unless you are very educated or a researcher in the field, this is probably years worth of work. This includes reading all the mathematics, understanding it, and doing the exercises. (Of course, not all exercises can be reasonably done by anyone, as some of them are actually open research problems.)
Because you'd be in it for the long run, cheap paper copies are a bad idea, unless you don't mind pages falling out and deteriorating. Doing a semester-long course in some subject? Okay, that's fine. But purchasing for personal reasons the opus magnum of one of the greatest computer scientists? That feels a little different.
Although you've already paid a measly one-tenth of the price already, I'd consider paying the full price, and take your first as just a tax on the lesson learned. In the USA, many of us would get a 5-10% markup anyway (sales tax), so it's not all that devastating.
Edit/Addendum: Lastly, one important thing. For anyone reading this comment: While there is prestige in finding errors, that should not even be remotely close to the reason you purchase the books. The checks, in their original intent, are small awards for finding mistakes, and only somewhat artificially have they turned into something more. The true reward, as cliché as this sounds, is being able to read Knuth's prose and learning from it.
If you believe that having such an achievement will slingshot you ahead in business or academia, this is almost surely false. While the award is nice to get, it won't give you much in return. I own two checks, and they're on my résumé, but I don't think they've carried much weight, if at all, at the multitude of companies I've applied for and been at. I think I've been asked about them only once, and even that time, the interviewer wasn't interested in hearing about numerical algorithms or boolean satisfaction.
(Unless Rs. isn't Rupee, but Google thinks it is)
You need to be able to trust a book. I received a misprint of a book I ordered online once, duplicate pages, missed half a chapter. I didn't need that particular chapter for the course I was taking then, and it was a week before the exam so I didn't send it back, it's a really cool book (Computational Geometry) that, like other interesting study books, I would pick up again and browse occasionally, if it weren't for this mess up. It's a shame, really.
That said, lunch in the company cafeteria was about 50 Rs, if I recall. So, where I would spend about 5 to 8 USD at home on a modest lunch, they would spend what amounted to 1 USD. Salaries are scaled accordingly, so yeah, those Rupees come dearly when you have to earn them locally.
100 Rs might exchange for 2 USD, but it feels like having to earn 10 USD (or more).
Also over the past year, the value of dollar has increased to Rs 67(or the value of Rupee has fallen, whatever). The point is, it burns more now. And the burn amount keeps fluctuating.
Apologies if I am pedagogical but it is "Gandhi" and not "Ghandi".
My reasons for buying weren't to win a Knuth reward check. I wasn't even sure of being able to understand the book, let alone find an error.
A friend recently recommended "The Broken Sword" by Poul Anderson. The trouble is, the text of the 1954 work was watered down in 1971. So it's apparently important to read the right edition, or so Michael Moorcock warns. [1]
I've had small online booksellers assure me they have the edition I want. When I open the package in the mail, it's never the right version. When I contact the merchant to ask how I can find the right edition, they just refund my money and stop talking to me.
Other sales people have told me they have no warehouse access, they have no way to confirm what's getting in the boxes. The easiest way for them to find out the edition of a book is to just ship it to me and have me let them know.
You'd think you could have a meaningful discussion with a bookseller about editions. I know it's not something that matters for every sale, but you'd think at least those few who choose to deal in books would occasionally notice that not all books with the same title look identical, and start to wonder why.
We've moved from a world where I can put my hands on a book, glance at the copyright page, feel the paper, see the condition, to one where every version of a work, from annotated to abridged, can be lumped together as a fungible commodity.
I know, Bezos moves a lot of paper, this isn't going to keep him up at night. But if I get one "old man yells at clouds" rant, this goes in mine.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/25/featuresreviews...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Broken-Sword-Fantasy-Masterworks...
Apparently the Gollancz Fantasy-Masterworks versions are true to the 1954 version.
I'll give the .co.uk version a try, thanks.
Low price editions, or LPE's are the best things to have happened to Indian students. Without them I couldn't have cleared my engineering exams. And I have never faced problems like these in the past nor do I remember any body among my friends report such problems. In fact we only have praise for LPE's.
I am wondering if this is like a one-off goofup on the part of the publisher. Which it can very likely be.
And the price has nothing to do with it, basically because eventually everyone realizes that only thing that results from high prices is piracy. So you might as well sell at a decent price which customers are ready to pay.
Also not to look over the fact that both are published by PearsonEd. The US version by Addison-Wesley and the Indian version by Dorling-Kindersley. Both are PearsonEd subsidiaries.
The biggest problem is though, once we've bought the Indian edition, we wont buy the original edition(obviously). This makes it difficult for us to gauge how much off the edition we own is from the original one.
They're quite scraped up and ugly, but the content is all there :)
The initial cost (paying knuth) is already paid for ages ago. The editorial work is extra for each edition, and probably paid on the local market prices.
The costs now are printing and distribution. I will guess it is cheap. Specially with local market prices.
All that is left to price the product now is how much profit you can extract from the market and still make a sale. Don't we discuss A/B testing of price here over and over?
In the USA, people can be convinced to pay $150~$800. in India they probably lose the sale if they charge R1000.
In both cases, they make the sale with the most optimum profit available at each market, while providing no real benefit for the consumers who still can't get a digital version.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_Son....
My apologies. I never meant it to be serious. :) Btw, the subject in the text is indeed interesting and disheartening at the same time.
Yes indeed it is disheartening. It is a magnificent book(from what I've read till now) and its a shame to see Dr. Knuths efforts being so badly treated.
I never run into this problem due to having done so, but I see a lot of people complaining about it...
In other words, the reason I do not set a minimum font size is that Firefox treats the minimum font size as a hard limit to be observed even when the user explicitly asks to reduce the size of the text (which, again, I would need to do whenever the site does not render sanely at my preferred font size).
So I find myself increasing the size of the text many, many times a day. At least recent versions of Firefox allow me to add to the navigation toolbar a "[-|+]" widget that lets me increment or decrement the size with one click. Also, Firefox often remembers the text size for the next time I visit the same site.
Hope that answers your question.
I seem to recall a few sites' breaking (becoming difficult to navigate or fathom) if the text size is even slightly larger than the default size set by the site, so I am curious as to why you do not have that problem. (I seem to recall Amazon or Ebay being one such site.)
This is one book where the author has taken great care, and decades of work, to truly build the book from the ground up.
The book, the fonts, and the style were developed for paper. Knuth even has 5 other volumes of books containing the instructions and source code to reproduce almost every single curve, stroke, and space you see in the books.
I think advocating digital publishing is probably good, but not for all things. Books shouldn't be treated as source code with continuous deployment. Even one word on one page can massively restructure the rest of the document, making it extremely difficult to coordinate and fix.
What I think should be fixed is the dissemination of authentic books at a reasonable price, for especially students who typically don't have much money at all.
What's interesting is that a draft version of Concrete Mathematics is available (by doing a simple Google search), and it looks very similar to the final edition. I'm not sure why the publisher wouldn't just release the finalized PDF as the draft looks pretty good on my iPad.
Just buy the American edition, problem solved.
How many developers (students and those entering the field) in India can afford such a high price? We take a lot of the knowledge we get in the West for granted, but the rest of the world isn't so lucky.
Yes - really a rather profound change. The entire way new books are produced has changed as a result as well. Print-on-demand in particular can result in you literally having a "one-off" edition of a book. The benefit is quicker integration of corrections. Am not sure we really fully understand some of the negative consequences...
Sadly, It seems the same is beginning to apply to books as well. Publishers should take heed of this unless they want to follow the fate of music and movie industries.
That section has undergone major changes for each edition. The current edition is fine if you just want to know the best answer (as of the time that edition was written). However, if you also read the earlier two editions, you will get a deeper understanding of the material.
You could also look at "Mathematics for Computer Science" by Lehman, Leighton, and Meyer. It is available at http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/fall10/mcs-ftl.pdf .
Also, I never claimed all the Indian books are flawed. You wouldn't know until you buy one. Your best bet would be to check one out from a library, use it, figure it out for yourself and then decide whether to buy an Indian edition or the real one.
I am an expat (repat?) living in rural India and do not have access to libraries.
India is a beautiful place, with lots of brilliant, talented people, but until their local and federal governments start observing and enforcing the rule of law, it's going to remain one of the shittiest countries to live in.
At least the author seems to be making an effort to rise above this "shit that happens". How? by studying and working hard to be able to get a shot at, either leaving the country, achieving a better quality of life (i.e. more money, whenever money does make things better, which is certainly not all things) and/or by complaining and raising flags about this and hoping that enough fuss will make some poeple move their asses and change things.
That was very, very offensive. Are you an Indian? or at the least been to India? My mother has been using public transport for 25 years (now traveling upto 150Kms for her job). She never had a problem. Show some data and or shut up your arrogant mouth.
TIME just posted an article about high-profile gang rape in India a couple days ago: http://world.time.com/2013/09/02/india-fury-over-gang-rapes-...
But media concentrating so much on this topic is because people are finally ready to talk about such stuff. I've heard of dozens of rumors of rape that were allegedly subdued over the last few years. I think the Delhi rape incident was the tipping point.
I don't think rape cases have increased, I think the reporting and public outcry have gone up. India is finally dealing with the most shameful parts of a society whose discussion was until now anti-cultural, any discussion related to sex is anti-cultural. In our movies the most just thing for a rape victim was to get them married to the rapist, that was considered giving the victim a life, go figure that out.
Despite all that, I and several other people go by our day mostly care free. There is a sense of security in our social lives. Shit still happens, where doesn't it not happen. But this shit is not new, it is not unique to us. Making such lame shallow comment about a culture is insensitive.
I don't think that there is a dramatic increase in rapes in India, its just that information flows more freely now. I agree that its getting attention because people in India are finally ready to talk about such issues. When I talk about India being a shitty country, I'm talking about the government, and the people who allow the caste system to persist. Many average Indians are outraged by the way that rape victims are treated, yet the government just wants everyone to act like its OK to punish the victims.
For what its worth, I bitch about the United States just as much if not more than any other country, because we have been fucking up a lot lately too.
It is, because it reeks of irony, cultural chauvinism, and a fundamental Western bias.
> Receiving Justice in India is largely a function of gender and caste.
Replace gender and caste with money, and your statement becomes correct. In fact, there is quite a bit of reverse discrimination when it comes to the caste system.
Your earlier comments show a complete lack of understanding and context of Indian culture, so I won't bother picking them apart. All I can say is, it must take a scary level of indoctrination to draw the logical conclusion that "no wonder there are so many rapes in this country!" from "error in reprinted CS book".
It would be ironic if I were on here denying the problems that my own country faces, while commenting on India's. But as I said, I spend a lot of time talking about that as well, so irony doesn't make sense either.
What is the context of Indian culture that makes institutional corruption, gender / class discrimination, and the demonization of rape victims OK? Once again, please keep in mind that I'm not talking about all of India, just the corrupt government institutions and wealthy individuals that are comfortable living in the middle ages.
I don't see why this is such a controversial view, if you made a comment about corruption in America, I'd be more inclined to agree with you than to act like my personal honor has been besmirched because my country isn't perfect.
Why so many negative votes? What was wrong about me being offended by such an insensitive statement. The statement was factually incorrect. Is it not arrogant to comment on a country like that without data?
Presumably, you didn't rape anybody, and you probably don't have any major political/government connections that would allow you to make things better in your country. You are just a bystander in a place that has some significant problems. So am I, but that doesn't mean I get personally offended when people talk about it.
Having said that, we are working on trying to fix things. I use the word 'we' in the sense that I work with few NGOs who have made women's safety their primary concern and are achieving success in it too. CodeForIndia being one such organization that I am a part of at the moment and also am an active developer in a project about womens safety. Of course, there is a huge chance we will all fail miserably in our attempts, but it would still be better than spreading pessimism all over and not acting at all.
Also while dealing with such wrongful activities, I don't think prioritizing is a good idea. I am not comparing this with rape. I am talking about all corrupt or negligent activites. A lot of people are trying here. Not as many as we'd like to, but still.
I just do not like that a country of over a billion is discredited due to the acts of a few. Neither am I saying that the acts of those few should be ignored, of course not. I would rather appreciate some action being taken over unproductive negative criticism.
On the other hand, rape cases have nothing to do with government. This is people inflicting pain on people. And its not just rape but any sort of attack on safety and we can be optimist about cleaning up this mess. Also it has to be understood that one person or a group can not just decide to fix it and the next day rapes stop happening. It will take a while to make it happen. In the mean time, more rapes might happen and we can't do much about it. It doesn't mean no one cares about those getting raped. Its just that not much can be done when most of the population prefers to be armchair critics.
I'm quite disgusted to see this poor comment. I don't understand how it is adding to the topic at hand. You went from a re-printed book with an error to rape and politics in the country of the author. The article had nothing to do with either.
Even if India has the highest rape statistics in the world, that doesn't add any relevance to the point you are making, which basically boils down to: You don't have a reasonable expectation of riding a public bus without getting raped to death, therefor you should expect "shit" like outdated re-prints. What?
Rape statistics are not even clear enough to make the point that India has more cases of rape than the USA (due to differences in reporting rates and definitions of rape). Some experts estimate rape statistics to be about equal [1]. Homicide statistics are a lot clearer in both reporting and definition and there the USA "beats" India. [2]
>India is a beautiful place, with lots of brilliant, talented people, but until their local and federal governments start observing and enforcing the rule of law, it's going to remain one of the shittiest countries to live in.
Is that your final conclusion? That India is a shitty country to live in? To an article about an Indian re-print of Donald Knuth's book with an error in it?
If you had used this argument template for an American author, to drag American politics and crime rates into an unrelated topic, you'd be ridiculed and derided.
[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/01/02/are-women-safe... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
If a society's legal system is demonstrably corrupt, the rest of the society is bound to follow.
You could argue that the same thing applies to the United States, and I would agree. Right now, however, I feel that the stage the U.S. justice system is in is that of the functional alcoholic. Its still working for the most part, but it could completely fall apart at any time.
>Is that your final conclusion?
Yes. It is a shitty place to live, unless you come from a privileged family. It obviously doesn't have to be, and it might not always be but as of today, it is. If you took a hundred random people and asked them which country they would rather live in(Out of the two), probably at least 75 (And this is generous) would say the United States, even though we are in the middle of a downward spiral. If you asked them which country they would rather live in as a lower-middle class citizen, only an imbecile (or perhaps someone with family in India) would choose to live in India.
The United States botches rape trials on a regular basis, but still, in spite of our own corrupt system, it's significantly better than what's going on in India. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that you are correct, and that the per-capita rape statistics are similar. However, in the United States, you have a much better chance of bringing the perpetrator to justice.
I honestly don't know how you can live in America and expect nasty shit not to happen. The murder rate in America is 4.8 times higher than the country I live in. [1]
(see how offensive/stupid that sounds)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
Interestingly, when I consider how dangerous America is compared to my home country (4.8x), that's the same as you looking at Mexico, Sudan, Panama or Brazil. The American media thinks Mexico is a murderous hell-hole, which, statistically speaking, is what we should (and often do) think of America.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2398257/Chris-Lane-m...
>I honestly don't know how you can live in America and expect nasty shit not to happen. The murder rate in America is 4.8 times higher than the country I live in.
The reason that I have an expectation that it doesn't happen, is because all levels of my government openly oppose the act of murder.
Things that are true shouldn't offend us. America has lots of faults, and I talk about them quite often.
There's a distinct possibility that anyone with access to a computer in India is largely immune to a significant portion of the government's corruption and the caste system. Also since you like statistics, try taking a look at pretty much any corruption index survey to see where India lies.