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Volume 4A of Knuth's TAOCP Finally In Print
jantangring writes "It's been 28 years since Volume 3 of Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming was published. The book series is a classic work of computer science in spite of the fact that still more than half of the seven volume series is still to be finalized. In 1992 Donald Knuth retired to medieval monkness in order to finish his work. After many long years in draft, volume 4A now in print and you can get it in a boxed set if you don't mind admitting that you don't already own the first three volumes. They won't be checking if you read it."
I have read his copy of volume three. The sheer walls of his retreat were quite a challenge but the rest of it was easy.
Right now, tex (written by Knuth) is at version number 3.141592.
Following the same pattern, we may get a boxed library of programming books from Knuth without ever reaching volume 5.
Donald Knuth has published a book and a date has been set for the release of Duke Nukem Forever? It's all too much.
The 3 first volumes of "The art of computer programming" were for many years the de-facto reference for learning about data structures and algorithms using a rigorous approach.
The problems given at the end of each chapter are comprehensive and often very difficult, which make the series challenging and particularly interesting.
Today there are much better textbooks if you simply want to learn about algorithms. The TAOCP series demonstrates implementations using MIX, a made-up assembly language which is quite frankly, horrible. However, this doesn't change the fact that the series was a huge contribution to the field, and still has its merits.
He's a professor. I'm pretty sure he can procrastinate without the aid of email. He wrote an entire typesetting system as a procrastination exercise once! Most PhD students would envy that level of dedication to The Art Of Procrastination.
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...and until Vol.1 is updated:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html
'As I continue to write Volumes 4 and 5, I'll need to refer to topics that belong logically in Volumes 1--3 but weren't invented yet when I wrote those books. Instead of putting such material artificially into Volumes 4 or 5, I'll put it into fascicle form. The first such fascicle is in fact ready now (see above): It describes MMIX, a RISC machine that is used in Volume 4A; MMIX will also take the place of MIX in all subsequent editions of Volumes 1, 2, and 3.
Download the 16 Feb 2004 version of Volume 1 Fascicle 1 (583KB of compressed PostScript) (this old version is however no longer being maintained)':
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/fasc1.ps.gz