ANN: Algorithms for Optimization book draft

deyandyankov · January 22, 2019, 12:01am

This is amazing, I am preordering. Thank you very much!

Ronis_BR · January 22, 2019, 12:24am

Excellent! Will the ebook be available on release date?

tamasgal · January 22, 2019, 9:14am

Nice, congratulations! I’d like to order it right now

I had the opportunity to see a preliminary version of the book which already was quite complete and I was really amazed (sorry that I could not find time to send more comments). Looking forward to it!

chrisvwx · January 22, 2019, 5:36pm

I also would love to be able to buy a PDF version of the book.

mykelk · January 22, 2019, 5:44pm

Great! I just checked with MIT Press and they said that ebook releases are generally within 10 days of print. They’re looking into it (hopefully they can get it out even before print!), and I’ll get back to you.

mykelk · January 27, 2019, 11:26pm

I just heard that we should expect ebooks to be available starting Feb 19. It will be released as ePub, mobi, and bookmarked PDF.

Evizero · January 28, 2019, 9:08am

I really enjoyed reading Decision Making Under Uncertainty and I am looking forward to reading this one.

jlperla · January 28, 2019, 1:45pm

I am really looking forward to reading it. From the blog post, one thing that stood out was

Code testing is done using Travis-CI, a continuous integration framework that is also triggered on every commit. Travis runs test scripts we wrote to test the code in our algorithm environments."

Did you have CI working on the latex builds as well? If so, I would love to see how you guys setup latex with CI on Travis (and julia in the same setup).

mykelk · January 28, 2019, 4:23pm

We have the full latex build running on a local server. The build is triggered with each commit. For our public repos that install latex on Travis, see this or this.

mbesancon · February 11, 2019, 1:44pm

Congratulations to the both of you, eager to see the book out there to spread the message that Julia is a first choice for optimization, from integer to non-linear differentiable

ExpandingMan · February 11, 2019, 3:36pm

Looks really nice, I plan to buy this and am looking forward to receiving it!

Thanks for all your hard work.

jpsamaroo · February 11, 2019, 3:43pm

I can’t wait for the ebook to come out! I’ll definitely be buying a copy.

Also, thanks so much for putting the Julia implementations up on Github!

tawheeler · February 11, 2019, 6:28pm

We have a script that exports the julia code blocks from the book and loads them into a separate repo. This repo is tied to Travis-CI the way other julia packages are.

tawheeler · February 11, 2019, 6:29pm

I’ll be giving a talk at the Bay Area Julia Users group on March 13th! Will cover how Julia was used in the book and POMDPs.jl.

chakravala · February 14, 2019, 2:09am

I happen to have a Travis CI setup to auto-compile LaTeX for me on every commit on this repo

It also automatically uploads the PDFs to a dropbox folder (which is linked in the README)

github.com

chakravala/Math-Research-Notes/blob/master/.travis.yml

dist: trusty
before_install:
- "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-latex-extra texlive-fonts-extra texlive-math-extra texlive-latex-recommended dvipng texlive-generic-recommended texlive-pictures texlive-science texlive-luatex texlive-xetex texlive-latex-base texlive-publishers texlive-font-utils fonts-lmodern pgf"
script:
- curl "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/andreafabrizi/Dropbox-Uploader/master/dropbox_uploader.sh" -o dropbox_uploader.sh; chmod +x dropbox_uploader.sh; echo "OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN=$DRPBX" >> ~/.dropbox_uploader
- files=`git show --pretty="" --name-only | grep -E '.tex$' | grep -Ev '^(mathsym|mathdoc|preview|theorem)'`
- for file in $files;do cd $(dirname $file);for x in {1..2};do lualatex ${file##*/};done;cd ..;upl=${file//".tex"/".pdf"};./dropbox_uploader.sh upload $upl ${BRANCH_NAME}/$upl;wait $! & done
- export DRPBX=0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000; echo "0000000000000000000$DRPBX" >| ~/.dropbox_uploader

it’s a fairly simple script, basically consists of 5 compound commands (and it only recompiles the PDF for the .tex files which were changed in the new commit)

amrods · March 5, 2019, 7:46am

Hey @mykelk, where can I buy a pdf version of the book? The buying options on the MIT Press website are only for the hardcover version. I prefer pdf because other ebook formats often mess with the display of math formulas.

mykelk · March 6, 2019, 9:02pm

The ebook versions were sent out to the vendors (e.g., Amazon) on Monday. They are offering both “print replica” version as PDF as well as reflowing versions. If your screen can handle it, I would recommend the print replica, but the reflow version is actually pretty good. Hopefully this will show up on vendor sites by this weekend.

mykelk · March 6, 2019, 9:05pm

Actually, the Kindle edition (with reflow) is showing up right now on Amazon.

amrods · March 6, 2019, 11:50pm

Got it, thank you.

VivMendes · April 9, 2019, 8:08pm

Congrats. The book looks extremely interesting. I’ve just tried to buy an ebook version of it but in Amazon there is only a Kindle option (besides the hardcopy), and at MIT Press there seems to be only the hardcopy option. Kindle is awful for a book of this nature. The maths symbols and equations get a horrible format. How can I buy a pdf version of the book?