I know that we're discouraged from meta-comments, but what is going on in this thread? It's a nearly 800-page book about the art of programming. A huge amount of work on a topic that should be dear to our hearts. News for hackers, right?
But somehow, the discussion has three themes. It's 50+ comments of "I don't like the first sentence of the marketing copy", "I don't like the tool the author is using", and "what would happen if we train an LLM on this book?". Has anyone read the sample chapter? Did you like it? Anyone here owns volume 1 and has opinions about that?
I own volume 1 and when it first arrived I dropped it on my foot and had to go to the doctor. I have not got around to reading it again. His original x86 ASM book was good though.
I also read his Write Great Code series and generally found it to have some pretty good advice, but it was also full of things like recommendations to never trust compilers and to write lots of arcane unreadable magic code to unlock ultimate speedy hacker cred.
That being said, if you want to learn about ASM in TYOOL 2026 then you could do a lot worse than learning it from someone who doesn't trust compilers and does everything themselves.
this is what almost every hn post is: lowbrow reflexive/reactionary responses. it's been like this for years. try to call it out and you'll be censured by dang or one of the other police officers for being "uncharitable" or something like that <shrug>
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