I've tried a couple of times. Gearing up for another attempt soon.
But there's one thing I've found interesting. I'm still stuck in Chapter 1.2: the infamous Mathematical Preliminaries section. I am not proud of this. From what I can tell, the various aborted liveblogging attempts I've seen also all get stuck here. Knuth himself recommends skipping it if you get stuck.
But even though I haven't yet managed to finish that single part of the book -this part which comes before any actual computer stuff- I STILL come out of it a much better programmer. Every. Single. Time. I haven't yet written a line of MIX or MMIX, and I have STILL been able to use this book to level-grind, just by getting further in 1.2 than I was able to get before. It's awesome. Even when I fail, I come out stronger.
I do eventually plan to blog my own attempt. My plan, though, is to not actually blog 1.1 and 1.2 live: I will do these chapters, write the articles on them to give myself a buffer, and only put up the blog once I'm already through The Big Filter. I figure this will give me a much better chance of actually succeeding once I start.
> I'm still stuck in Chapter 1.2: the infamous Mathematical Preliminaries section
You might want to try starting with "Concrete Mathematics" (also by Knuth): it's a longer intro to the same material, but covering a lot more of the background that TAOCP just kind of assumes that you already know.
But there's one thing I've found interesting. I'm still stuck in Chapter 1.2: the infamous Mathematical Preliminaries section. I am not proud of this. From what I can tell, the various aborted liveblogging attempts I've seen also all get stuck here. Knuth himself recommends skipping it if you get stuck.
But even though I haven't yet managed to finish that single part of the book -this part which comes before any actual computer stuff- I STILL come out of it a much better programmer. Every. Single. Time. I haven't yet written a line of MIX or MMIX, and I have STILL been able to use this book to level-grind, just by getting further in 1.2 than I was able to get before. It's awesome. Even when I fail, I come out stronger.
I do eventually plan to blog my own attempt. My plan, though, is to not actually blog 1.1 and 1.2 live: I will do these chapters, write the articles on them to give myself a buffer, and only put up the blog once I'm already through The Big Filter. I figure this will give me a much better chance of actually succeeding once I start.