Thanks for the post! Do you (or does anybody else) know how different the second edition is from the first edition? Is there a significant amount of important new material? I’ve been intending to read the book (and your review has strengthened the intention) but my library only has the first edition. Should I hold out for the newer edition or will it not make much of a difference?
In general, imperfect action is better than inaction. From a brief glance at the table of contents in the first edition, it looks like they’re fairly similar- the second edition has an extra chapter (of which a few sections are great and several are skippable). Many of the sections have extensions from work done after 2000, but the basic concepts underwent little change. I would imagine that the second edition has fewer errors, but without a detailed reading I can’t tell how significant that is.
The main trouble you could get into with reading just the first edition that I can think of is a few of the definitions which underwent significant revision to exclude some corner cases where they misbehaved.
I think I would ask the library if they can order the second edition while starting to read the first edition.
Thanks for the post! Do you (or does anybody else) know how different the second edition is from the first edition? Is there a significant amount of important new material? I’ve been intending to read the book (and your review has strengthened the intention) but my library only has the first edition. Should I hold out for the newer edition or will it not make much of a difference?
In general, imperfect action is better than inaction. From a brief glance at the table of contents in the first edition, it looks like they’re fairly similar- the second edition has an extra chapter (of which a few sections are great and several are skippable). Many of the sections have extensions from work done after 2000, but the basic concepts underwent little change. I would imagine that the second edition has fewer errors, but without a detailed reading I can’t tell how significant that is.
The main trouble you could get into with reading just the first edition that I can think of is a few of the definitions which underwent significant revision to exclude some corner cases where they misbehaved.
I think I would ask the library if they can order the second edition while starting to read the first edition.