Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Who Reads CS:APP?

I gathered some data on the total sales of the various versions of CS:APP.  It's now in its second edition, and it has appeared in multiple languages:
  • English.  Including versions published in India (1st edition only) and China (1st and 2nd edition) for readers in those two countries
  • Chinese (1st and 2nd edition)
  • Korean (2nd edition)
  • Russian (1st edition)
  • Macedonian (1st edition)
All told, as of Dec. 31, 2011, a total of  116,574 books have been sold, across all editions, versions, and formats (paperback, hardcopy, e-book).  The following pie chart shows how this divides across the language categories (sorry, no statistics on Macedonian, but I imagine the numbers are fairly small):





One thing that's clear is that we're very popular in China: fully 52% of the total has been in Chinese, and another 15% has been the English version for the Chinese market.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Update to the Bomb Lab

We've updated the Bomb Lab sources on the CS:APP site to address a problem that arises when students from previous semesters run their old bombs while the current instance of the lab is underway.

The Bomb Lab servers assign diffusions and explosions to Bomb IDs, rather than users, and Bomb IDs start over from scratch each term. Thus, if a student  who took the class last semester ran their old bomb while the lab was as underway this semester, then the explosions and diffusions from the old bomb would be incorrectly assigned to the current bomb with the same Bomb ID.

To address this, we've added a per-semester identifier, called $LABID,  to the Bomb Lab config file. Instructors can set this variable each term (for example $LABID="f12") to uniquely identify each offering. Any results from previous bombs with different $LABIDs are ignored.

Thanks for Prof. Godmar Bak, Virginia Tech, for pointing this out.