On 2006-01-16, Paul Rubin <> wrote: > I came across this while looking up some data compression info today. > > David J.C. MacKay > Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms > > Full text online: > http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/ > > It's a really excellent book, on the level of SICP but about > information theory, probability, error correcting codes, etc. Very > readable, and geeky (in a good way) at the same time. The writing > style is perhaps along the lines of "Numerical Recipes", though the > format is more conventional. > > The whole text is online as a pdf, which is very nice. The printed > version is somewhat expensive, but according to the following analysis > it's a better bargain than "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone": > > http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/Potter.html
That made me smile on a Monday morning (not an insignificant accomplishment). I noticed in the one footnote that the H.P. book had been "translated into American". I've always wondered about that. I noticed several spots in the H.P. books where the dialog seemed "wrong": the kids were using American rather than British English. I thought it rather jarring. -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! Don't SANFORIZE me!! at visi.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list