First of all, dupe.

Second: the headline is incorrect. The (hardcover edition of) Volume 4A won't be shipping for another week (January 22th.)

Finally: Volume 4A has been available in part for quite some time now (the first fascicles were published in 2005), and in whole for over a year (if you put all the paperback fascicles together.) Still, the publication in hardcover is certainly a milestone.

Putting all of your paperback fascicles together won't quite get you Volume 4A. They were beta versions and don't contain corrections that have happened since their release.

So a better title: "AoCP goes 1.0 later this week"?

How about, "Knuth submits!"

A link to a pre-order page at informit.com (cheaper than Amazon) was already posted here: http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=2104796

"Then I will publish a ``reader's digest'' edition of Volumes 1--5, condensing the most important material into a single book. "

-- After he finishes vol 4, and re-revises 1-3 again, then 5, and ... perfectionism is nice and all but, he's mortal - I hope he takes that into account.

Yeah, it would be great for most of us (his interested readers) if he just supervised a few post-docs to grind it all out. He could easily get the funding, but it's not his style.

I'm re-reading Volume 2, section 3 on Trees. On p.320 he makes the off-hand remark General methods for doing this are discussed in Chapter 8. What a sense of humor!

"Yeah, it would be great for most of us (his interested readers) if he just supervised a few post-docs to grind it all out. He could easily get the funding, but it's not his style."

Why should he let them have all the fun?

The table of contents is: http://www.amazon.ca/Art-Computer-Programming-Combinatorial-...

    Chapter 7: Combinatorial Searching 1
    7.1: Zeros and Ones 47
    7.2: Generating All Possibilities 281

There are 23 more headings in the outline for the remainder of volume 4...

Does anyone know if The Art of Computer Programming will be released as an eBook soon?

And the affiliate marketing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2109543

Clyfe is pointing out the blatant money spinner by the parent poster .. in case you didn't see that already.

Is there something other than just "bad form" as to why people would not want to go through an affiliate link if the ultimate purchase price for them is the same?

Yes. Doing so makes it more profitable to post worthless affiliate links in places like this, which encourages people to do so, which makes the web a noisier place.

(Note that this is not a justification for avoiding all affiliate links.)

Also it's not adding anything, very easy for us to go through to amazon and search for the book. Might be different if the posted recommended a great book that many hadn't heard of before that really added to the discussion, still though it would be better just to keep them off HN.

Note that the post was edited in the mean time. Sadly no history a la stackoverflow.com .

I did not knowingly post an affiliate link.

Of the parts of the URL, which is it?

http: //www.amazon.com/ Art-Computer-Programming-Combinatorial-Information /dp /0201038048/

And, I did not edit the link. Perhaps some admin removed the affiliate part. However, when I go to the page in my browser, it looks just like it does above. Perhaps I followed a link to Amazon earlier in my session and picked up someone's affiliate link.