Like others here, as soon as I read the first couple of sentences, I mostly expected the result.
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.
Regarding the exercises, I think it's pretty reasonable to do everything up to difficulty 25/M25 (even HM25 if you have the background), plus one or 2 between 30-40 per section. If you do that, you'll make progress at a reasonable pace and probably get about as much as you practically can out of it.
Yes you do make a great deal of sense. I guess my initial worry was that if the book would make any sense to me at all. It comes with a reputation of its own. I didn't seem like a good idea to spend 5000 bucks on a book that I might end up staring at for a few weeks and then give up.
Now I understand everything in the book, but do not trust its content. Regret that.
I recently purchased these as well (for around $250 on Amazon + shipping, a steal considering they were going for around $400 locally), and I have to say, I'm so glad I didn't end up going for the cheap Indian copy which was available via AbeBooks at the time, after reading this story. What a terrible thing to do to a classic.
Don't let the page numbering ruin these books for you as the contents will provide you enjoyment for the rest of your life. Its great that you were able to get your own copy of them. At university in New Zealand TAOCP was on the recommended reading list for CompSci but the library only had one of each volume. You could only get them out for _3 hours_ at a time. Years later I was in a bookstore with my girlfriend a the time and I saw the 3 volume set for _$NZ 500_. She secretly went back the next day and brought them for me for my birthday. We are now married.
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.
The most upsetting part about this is that some of Knuth's valuable and limited mental energy was wasted because of some idiot publishers trying to make a buck and being sloppy.
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.
Actually almost all the Indian editions of the book are much more cheaper than its US based price in Dollars. And when you look at the paper quality, it feels like the price is justified.
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.
Maybe in this case, but South Asian editions are always super cheap. Physics and Chemistry books will be grayscale, so you have to try harder with some charts but otherwise they're all worth it. If I'd spent 400 dollars on every textbook I bought, my parents would've been bankrupted.
I've had good experiences with Indian editions of CLRS (though, granted, it's not the same publisher). But for TAOCP, I sprung for the real deal, a brand-new 4 volume set. I knew I'd be keeping these very books for the rest of my life, so I made sure to get the latest, high-quality edition.
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.
The books you have are just fine. The books were high quality when they first came out. Thousands of us studied the first printings without ill effects. Besides, you have the opportunity to test your reading by looking for errors. Just relax and enjoy a masterpiece.
If there is any book that you should get in paper form, it is TAoCP.
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.
Last I heard from the publisher, they are working on digital editions of TAoCP, not sure when it will be ready though (I was told that it will be of the quality that people expect from Knuth).
Probably. But still printed books are going to be the most widely used approach and giving such a treatment to education related books are never good for students.
>My biggest concern was that if in the future I end up buying a new book, how can I be sure it is the same book that I expected to be delivered, without any page messups or other oddities.
"At this point, all I hope is that PearsonEd makes the changes and fixes the pages in the new version and releases it. Until then, I shall have to fix my copy of TAOCP on my own or buy an expensive original edition."
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.
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.
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...
I always say that pirating games and films was simply better in every way than paying for them. Better quality, support, more convenient formats, minus the DRM. My conscience has been hardened by all the times i have been screwed over by crippling DRM when using something I have paid for. Pirated versions, of course have this removed for you.
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.
Lions' commentary on Unix was passed around for years like this before it was allowed to be officially published. There's a grand tradition of samizdat in academia for stuff like this (mostly pre-prints, though).
Those "reprint editions" could actually be useful. Consider the section of Volume II called "How Fast Can We Multiply?" (or something close to that).
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.
I searched it on Amazon and saw numerous reviews saying you need a strong grasp of discrete mathematics, which is hardly "very very little" knowledge of math. I didn't study serious discrete math until my upper classes in undergraduate school.
As of now, I order books mostly over Amazon. They ship the 'real' edition. Its expensive but that's better than the other alternative.
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.
[+] [-] reikonomusha|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pmiller2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anuragramdasan|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anuragramdasan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsuth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] damianknz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chetanahuja|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brownbat|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] piqufoh|12 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Broken-Sword-Fantasy-Masterworks...
Apparently the Gollancz Fantasy-Masterworks versions are true to the 1954 version.
[+] [-] eigenvalue|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emiliobumachar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kamaal|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] peterkelly|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anuragramdasan|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] arjie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmiller2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcb0|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] egl2001|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saganus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anuragramdasan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jadyoyster|12 years ago|reply
I never run into this problem due to having done so, but I see a lot of people complaining about it...
[+] [-] JimmaDaRustla|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reikonomusha|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mikevm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anuragramdasan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
Just buy the American edition, problem solved.
[+] [-] anuragramdasan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eksith|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] EzGraphs|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] anonyblahblah|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] deletes|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmiller2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] susi22|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icelancer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ExpiredLink|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sukuriant|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markbernard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] talkingquickly|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treerex|12 years ago|reply
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 .
[+] [-] nsomaru|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anuragramdasan|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] losethos|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]