Art of Computer Programming, The, Volumes 1-3 Boxed Set, 3rd Edition

As Knuth himself says, it is impossible for any one person to keep up with all the research in computer science, but these 3 volumes do a remarkably good job of distilling the most important results and explaining them with mathematical rigor.

Each volume contains 2 chapters. Ch. 1, Basic Concepts: mathematical foundations and a description of MIX, a hypothetical machine (now available in software emulations). Ch. 2, Information Structures: lists, trees, memory allocation, garbage collection. Ch. 3, Random Numbers: how to produce series of "random" numbers and test their statistical properties. Ch. 4, Arithmetic: algorithms for integer and floating-point arithmetic. Ch. 5, Sorting: both in memory and on disks or tapes. Ch. 6, Searching: sequential, binary, hashing.

Despite the detailed coverage of the topics, which often involves esoteric mathematical notation, the author's lively style makes the algorithms and the main theoretical results relatively easy to... Read more

These books are indisputably classics of the field, and like all classics they have religious adherents and equally firm detractors. The key difference between the two groups is that the adherents are interested in computer SCIENCE, whereas the rest are more taken with computer programming. The books are well written, quite mathematical, and abstract. The books deal with the core subjects of computer science and shy away from the trendy, and so some people tend to see them as anachronistic. Nevertheless, they are deservedly core references in computer science, and a joy for any patient, theoretically minded reader. There are three points I believe should be made. 1) a lot of the detractors of the books are saying correct things: the books don't deal with hot topics, they do present things in greater detail than is necessary in day to day programming, they are books they require a lot of the reader. What they don't recognize is that this is the intention, and that there is... Read more

Twenty five years ago, after five years of experience programming scientific applications (mostly math stuff, not much real programming beyond algorithms) I began a job programming business applications. At that time, there was very little general communal knowledge about very basic stuff we take for granted today like searching, sorting, memory allocation, data structures...

I began my collection with Knuth and another book (no longer in print) dedicated to data structures. These books defined me as a programmer. I learned MIX only because, as a programmer, I felt that I should be able to understand Knuth's abstraction. I admit that I was frustrated by having to do this. Ironically, even back then, the "other book" used, what was the de facto standard for generically describing algorithms, an ALGOL like language-very pretty!

Many of us have looked forward to Knuth rewriting his artful collection to satisfy our sense of aesthetics. We don't consider that he... Read more